Week 36 of 2024

Three nuclear energy innovation news!

Quite of bit of salt today…

🧂 Three molten salt startups, THORIZON (NL), NAAREA (FR), and STELLARIA (FR), launch a cooperative research project with the Belgian nuclear research centre SCK CEN. The objective of CHLOE, funded by the OFFERR program of the SNETP, is to gather integral experimental data on the effect of chlorine on neutronic quantities of interest in nuclear reactors. The experiments will be conducted in the VENUS zero power reactor, which was created in 1964.

🌹 The Dutch and French nuclear regulators, ANVS and ASN, agree to collaborate on a preparatory review of THORIZON's Thorizon One reactor. Yet another outstanding move towards more cooperation among EU nuclear regulators.

🤖 Westinghouse Electric Company (US) launches its own nuclear-specific generative AI system, Hive, with a dedicated large language model named Bertha. It is fed with more than 100 years of proprietary data, via a highly secure system infrastructure and software. The objective is to help customers optimize maintenance planning, enhance inspections and improve the digital user experience to provide operational teams with the right information at the right moment.

👨‍🎓 Paper of the week: "Transient Covalency in Molten Uranium(III) Chloride", Journal of the American Chemical Society (2024)

👉 Unexpected behavior of uranium salts at high temperature.

In other news, I shared here a few potential master thesis topics. Feel free to share with engineering students in your network, or reach out directly to me if you’re interested.