Week 45 of 2023

Three nuclear energy innovation news!

🏋‍♀️ Launch of a consortium to mature lead-cooled reactor technologies. The first step is the construction of the 300 MWth ALFRED demonstrator in Romania, leveraging on the work achieved by Ansaldo Nucleare (Italy), ENEA (Italy) and RATEN (Romania). The ultimate goal is then to develop and build the 300-400 MWe LEANDRA small modular reactor at the SCK CEN premises in Belgium. Westinghouse Electric Company (US) is the main industrial partner for this project. The total cost of the project is put at some €1B.

🌹 Two news for ULC-Energy and Rolls-Royce SMR. A first partnership with Topsoe (Denmark) to investigate the production of hydrogen using Topsoe's Solid Oxide Electrolysis Cell (SOEC) technology with power and heat produced from small modular reactors. A second partnership with Dutch construction firm BAM Infra Nederland to deploy a fleet of small modular reactors in the Netherlands. The Rolls-Royce SMR is a 470 MWe design that can provide consistent baseload power for at least 60 years.

🚀 Launch of Valar Atomics with a $1.5M Seed from Riot Ventures. The team is working on a mass-produced reactor to extract hydrogen from water and capture atmospheric carbon to synthesize hydrocarbons. This enables off-grid production of energy that can easily be transported with the existing oil & gas infrastructure. The planning is to start building their Ward One prototype in El Segundo, California, as early as January 2024.

👨‍🎓 Paper of the week: "Optimization of target system for the production of 99-Mo via 100-Mo (γ,n) 99-Mo reaction", Applied Radiation and Isotopes (2023). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apradiso.2023.111059

👉 New method to produce the medical isotope Mo-99 using an electron accelerator system.

👇 Did you spot anything else? Let me know!