Week 8 of 2024
Three nuclear energy innovation news!
⛽ Fusion in the UK! UK Atomic Energy Authority signs agreements with Kyoto Fusioneering and the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories. The former is to advance tritium breeding blanket technology. The latter also concerns tritium, but with a broader scope for joint research projects and personnel secondments. Tritium is the fuel of fusion device, but it is extremely rare in nature and complex to produce artificially.
⚗️ Silex Systems Limited (Australia) and Cameco Corporation (Canada) decide to double the expenditures of their US joint venutre, Global Laser Enrichment. The demonstration of their uranium laser enrichment technology should take place this year, with commercial operations starting as early as 2028. Laser enrichment theoretically has a higher efficiency than traditionnal centrifuges, which could potentially result in lower cost.
🗑 Physicists from The University of Tokyo are able to predict how materials absorb neutrons and undergo transmutation by using a neutron beam to bombard selenium. This paves the way for more accurate method to measure, predict, and model neutron-induced reactions of long-lived isotopes, which is a key part of the nuclear waste transmutation process. The research was inspired by the study of colliding neutron stars.
👨🎓 Paper of the week: "Condensation of fallout glasses in the Hiroshima nuclear fireball resulting in oxygen mass-independent fractionation", Earth and Planetary Science Letters (2023). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2023.118473
👉 Condensates produced by the Hiroshima explosion are analogs of the first condensates of the solar system.
