Week 44 of 2023

Three nuclear energy innovation news!

🚀 Launch of Antares with a $8M Seed round from various investors including Caffeinated Capital, Humba Ventures, Pathbreaker Ventures, and Shrug Capital. Based on Los Angeles, the team is working on a transportable microreactor to power off-grid locations. The first target is the US military, but the long-term vision includes space applications.

🥨 Moltex Energy (Canada) demonstrates its Waste To Stable Salt (WATSS) process with laboratory experiments utilizing simulated fuel made of uranium dioxide and cerium oxide. The use of the latter as an analogue to transuranic oxide is supported by literature. The company is now advancing to experiments using actual used fuel from CANDU reactors. The first operational deployment of a WATSS unit is planned for the early 2030s.

🍩 The Japan Torus-60 Super Advanced (JT-60SA) experimental fusion reactor produces its first plasma. The facility is hosted at the National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST) in Naka (Japan). It was completed in 2020, using much of the existing site infrastructure from the Japan Torus-60 Upgrade (JT-60U) experiment. Its central unit is around 16 metres high and 13 metres in diameter, making it the world’s second-largest plasma research facility after ITER.

👨‍🎓 Paper of the week: "Strong Evidence for N-9 and the Limits of Existence of Atomic Nuclei", Physical Review Letters (2023). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.172501

👉 Discovery of light isotope of nitrogen that decays by emitting five protons.

👇 Did you spot anything else? Let me know!