💡 Three nuclear energy innovation news this week!
☀ Novatron Fusion Group AB (Sweden) closes a Seed round totaling €8 million, led Climentum Capital with participation from Industrifonden, Santander EIT InnoEnergy Climate Fund, and KTH Holding AB. The startup is developing an innovative fusion reactor solution for stable magnetic plasma confinment. The funds will be used to build pre-commercial prototypes, targetting the 2030s to develop an economically viable reactor.
🌬 The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) selects two pre-feasibility assessments for direct air capture projects to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that will rely on nuclear energy. GE Vernova intends to integrate GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy's BWRX-300 small modular reactor in a direct air capture (DAC) hub near Houston, Texas. The Northwestern University is developing a similar project in the Midwest.
⚛ A research project led by Jacobs highlights promising signs of using quantum algorithms to speed up radiation transport simulations. These are key for radiation shielding, dose assessments, nuclear criticality safety and reactor physics analysis. This was supported by the UK's National Quantum Computing Centre, with participation from Oxford Quantum Circuits, the National Nuclear Laboratory, Sellafield Ltd, and the University of Cambridge.
👨🎓 Paper of the week: "Deep reinforcement learning for a multi-objective operation in a nuclear power plant" in Nuclear Engineering and Technology (2023). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.net.2023.06.009
👉 Feasibility demonstration of automating multiple objectives optimization through the control of multiple devices in a nuclear power plant.
👇 Did you spot anything else? Let me know!