Week 50 of 2023

Three nuclear energy innovation news!

🤖 Microsoft is training an AI large language model with archived US Nuclear Regulatory Commission documents, in partnership with nonprofit Terra Praxis. Its objective is to streamline the paperwork required for setting up new nuclear power plants, a process that typically takes years and costs hundreds of millions of dollars. The collaboration aims to cut 90 percent of the human hours required for plant approval.

🚀 Helicity Space (US) secures a $5 million Seed round funding from investors including Airbus Ventures, TRE Ventures, Voyager Space, E2MC Ventures, Urania Ventures, and Gaingels. The company focuses on developing fusion-based in-space propulsion and power technology. It leverages on cutting-edge research such as plectonemic plasma jets for confinement, magnetic reconnection for heating, and peristaltic magnetic compression for raising energy density.

🧵 MetOx (US) secures a Series A extension to build an advanced production facility for high-temperature superconducting (HTS) wire. The facility aims to produce up to 1,200 km of magnet wire per year, while the current global production is only around 5,000 km. HTS wires are an essential component of compact nuclear fusion reactors. The investment was led by Koch Disruptive Technologies and involved several other investors such as Safar Partners and DNS Capital.

👨‍🎓 Paper of the week: "Self-Standing Porous Aromatic Framework Electrodes for Efficient Electrochemical Uranium Extraction", ACS Central Science (2023). https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscentsci.3c01291
👉 New high-performance material to retrieve uranium from seawater.

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