Week 33 of 2024

Three nuclear energy innovation news!

🤑 Aalo Atomics (US) raises a $27m Series A from several investors including Fifty Years, Nucleation Capital and more. The startup has already finished the conceptual design of the Aalo-1, its commercial reactor. It takes inspiration from MARVEL, a sodium-potassium cooled 100 kWe microreactor under development at the Idaho National Laboratory.

💥 Researchers at the North Carolina State University (US) develop a new way to detect and measure elements found in molten salt solutions. A probe capable of withstanding the heat of molten salt creates a plasma bubble, which emits a glow discharge, that a spectrometer can then read to determine which elements are present.  

🚢 Lloyd's Register, Core Power and A.P. Moller - Maersk sign a joint development project agreement. The objective is to conduct a regulatory assessment study to determine the safety and regulatory considerations for a nuclear-propelled containership to undertake cargo operations at a port in Europe.

👨‍🎓 Paper of the week: "Significantly enhanced critical current density and pinning force in nanostructured, (RE)BCO-based, coated conductor", Nature Communications (2024)

👉 World's highest-performing high-temperature superconducting wire segment at a price-performance metric significantly more favorable

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