Week 29 of 2024

Three nuclear energy innovation news!

🔌 Launch of The Nuclear Company, a new energy infrastructure developer that aims to build a fleet of nuclear power plants accross the US. Its first batch would total 6 GW (three pairs), based on approved and licensed technology already operating in the US, targetting electricity to the grid by the mid-2030s.

🧲 The WHAM experiment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (US) sets a new record for the stronger magnetic field confining a plasma: 17 tesla. The magnets were delivered by Commonwealth Fusion Systems - the startup's first commercial product officially on the market. The test was performed in cooperation with another fusion startup, Realta Fusion, spun out of WHAM in 2022.

♻ Oklo Inc (US) successfully completes the first end-to-end demonstration of the key stages of its advanced fuel recycling process, in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory. The technology aims to extract more than 90% of the remaining potential energy from used fuel. Oklo is working on a 15 MWe liquid metal fast reactor.

👨‍🎓 Paper of the week: "Actinium chelation and crystallization in a macromolecular scaffold", Nature Communications (2024)

👉 Advance in the understanding of actinium coordination chemistry, thus further enabling its use in nuclear medicine and beyond.

👇 Did you spot anything else? Let me me know!