Week 7 of 2024

Three nuclear energy innovation news!

♨ Jimmy Energy unveils plans for a new building and assembly factory for its nuclear thermal generators. The facility will be located in Creusot, Burgundy, one of France's nuclear hubs, and should be operational as early as 2026. Jimmy's high-temperature gas-cooled reactor design should occupy a volume of 20 m3 only, for a power rating of 20 MWth.

⚗️ The European Commission gives its final approval for a melting furnace for research purposes devevelopped by the SCK CEN and CRM Group (Belgium). The SMELD facility, which stands for State of the art Metal Melting Limiting waste during D&D, should be completed by 2026. Its objective is to explore methods for controlling the movements of radioisotopes during the fusion of low-level waste.

🏊 A team led by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency completes large-scale demonstration tests for a floating seismic isolation system (FSIS) designed to pair with small modular reactors. It uses a series of air cavities for seismic response damping and orifices for energy dissipation, in a structural platform that floats in a water pool. The outcome is an increase in design margins. The tests were conducted with a 1/15-scale mockup on the world's largest shaking table in Japan.

👨‍🎓 Paper of the week: "The quest for superheavy elements and the limit of the periodic table", Nature Reviews Physics (2023). https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-023-00668-y

👉 How much further can one push the limits of the periodic table?

👇 Did you spot anything else? Let me me know

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