Week 33 of 2023

Three nuclear energy innovation news!

💡 Three nuclear energy innovation news this week!

🕳 The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) launches a new Coordinated Research Project on deep borehole disposal for intermediate and high level radioactive waste. The objective is to expand the scientific and technical groundwork, potentially up to preliminary plans for a field demonstrator. The project is open for research proposals until the 15th of October.

🛩 The Elios 3 drone of Swiss developer Flyability was deployed on the UK's Sellafield Ltd site. A first flight was performed with a LIDAR to produce a 3D model of a site building, and a second flight with a dosimeter to map radiation hotspots.

🏛 U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission commissioners approve “a final rule and associated regulatory guide that applies risk-informed,performance-based emergency preparedness requirements” for SMRs and other new technologies. This emergency preparedness should be published in the Federal Register later this year.

📢 FYI, Swedish lead-cooled SMR company Leadcold becomes Blykalla.

👨‍🎓 Paper of the week: "Microsecond Isomer at the N=20 Island of Shape Inversion Observed at FRIB" in Physical Review Letters (2023). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.242501

👉 Measured shapes of exotic radioactive nuclei turned out to be notably different from predictions, further deepening nuclear physics mysteries.

👇 Did you spot anything else? Let me know!