Last week was one in which the words nuclear, energy and innovation came together in more places and in more contexts that in any other week I can readily recall. On Monday, November 30, President Obama, President Hollande and several other world leaders introduced Mission Innovation, which is a non binding pledge by the leaders…
On November 19, 2015, the Nuclear Innovation Alliance formally announced its existence. The group, based in Cambridge, MA, has the following mission description: The NIA’s mission is to lead advanced nuclear energy innovation. The NIA assembles companies, investors, experts, and stakeholders to advance nuclear energy innovation and enable innovative reactor commercialization through favorable energy policy…
On Tuesday, October 27, three leaders from X-Energy spoke to the Virginia ANS chapter about their company and the Xe-100, the high temperature, pebble bed gas reactor power system that they are designing. During the presentation, meeting attendees learned that X-Energy is an early phase start-up with a total staff of a few dozen people,…
On October 28, 2015, Westinghouse issued a press release titled AP1000® RCP REACHES FULL QUALIFICATION confirming a rumor I heard during my visit to Knoxville last week. The release contained wonderful, sigh of relief, news indicating that the hard-working, under-the-gun engineers and technicians at Curtiss-Wright’s EMD division had achieved their task of building and successfully…
Note: The initial version of this post was written based on an incorrect interpretation of the Roman numeral date stamp at the end of the video. The film was made in 1963, not 1968. The post was revised after a commenter provided the correct production date. End note. I have a theory about why the…
I applaud reasoned, long term thinking that aims to use science, technology and deep understanding of human wants and needs — aka politics — to set a course for success. You can find one of my favorite current examples of an effort that meets my criteria in the expansive, lightly populated, rather dry state of…
GE-Hitachi issued a press release on October 5 indicating that they will be working with DTE to determine the resource requirements and schedule for performing the detailed design work necessary to build an ESBWR (Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor) as Fermi Unit 3. Though DTE has not announced a decision to build the facility, it…
For the first time in several months, I gathered a group of nuclear energy experts to chat about recent events and announcements in nuclear energy. Participants in this episode include: Meredith Angwin who blogs at Yes Vermont Yankee and Northwest Clean Energy Steve Aplin who blogs at Canadian Energy Issues Les Corrice who blogs at…
On September 1-2 2015, the US DOE and US NRC jointly sponsored a workshop on advanced non-LWR [light water reactors]. Your intrepid reporter from Atomic Insights attended and managed to ask a few questions. The presentations are available here. One of the highlights of the first day of the workshop came during the question and…
Moltex Energy has developed a unique conceptual design for a molten salt reactor called the Stable Salt Reactor. In this design, the fuel salt is loaded into tubes that resemble the standard cladding tubes into which solid pellets are loaded in a conventional water cooled reactor. The tubes are arranged into assemblies that resemble the…
This is a story that I really don’t want to tell, but bad news is like old fish. It doesn’t smell any better as it ages. All eight AP1000 construction projects are at risk “for want of a nail.” In this case the nail is a reactor coolant pump, the largest one in the world,…
During the period between 1961 and 1994, an extraordinary machine called the Experimental Breeder Reactor 2 (EBR-II) was created and operated in the high desert of Idaho by a team of dedicated, determined, and distinguished people. In 1986, that machine demonstrated that it could protect itself in the event of a complete loss of flow…
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