Fission heated gas turbines address MIT Future of Nuclear challenges. Easier, straighter, less costly path

Addressing Recommendations of MIT Future of Nuclear Energy In a Carbon Constrained World The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a world renowned institution that has produced thousands of highly educated engineers and scientists. It is generously supported by foundations, corporations and governments. In 2003, the MIT Energy Initiative, began publishing a series of reports…

NuScale announces a major step in the NRC’s review of its passively safe SMR

NuScale, a leader in the increasingly competitive field of advanced nuclear reactor design, has announced that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) reviewers issued a document that formally agrees that their design does not require any electrical power to achieve safe shutdown. It’s difficult to explain the importance of that regulatory position. People with experience…

Urenco, Bruce Power Sign MOU To Develop U-Battery for Canada

Urenco, Bruce Power and AMEC NSS Limited recently announced that they had signed an MOU to cooperate in the design, licensing and development of Urenco’s U-Battery micro nuclear system for the Canadian electricity and heat market. The U-Battery contains a 10 MWth nuclear heat source that can be configured to produce either 4 MWe plus…

Who will be ThorCon’s EPC contractor?

Who will be ThorCon’s EPC contractor?

By Jack Devanney Engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contractors have led recent nuclear plant projects into disasters. Deca-billion dollar cost overruns. Schedules doubling. Some projects being cancelled after squandering billions of dollars. Giant corporations facing bankruptcy. This raises the obvious question: if Westinghouse can’t build a standard nuclear power plant, how in the world will a start up like ThorCon…

Clean and Doable Liquid Fission (LF) Energy Roadmap for Powering Our World

Clean and Doable Liquid Fission (LF) Energy Roadmap for Powering Our World

By: Robert Hargraves and Chris Uhlik Introduction This essay responds to an article by Stanford Professor Mark Z. Jacobson et al, 
100% Clean and Renewable Wind, Water, and Sunlight (WWS) All-Sector Energy Roadmaps for 139 Countries of the World. Their controversial WWS roadmap has several interesting features and benefits. Coal, natural gas, and petroleum energy…

Bechtel And BWXT Quietly Terminate mPower Reactor Project

Bechtel And BWXT Quietly Terminate mPower Reactor Project

Generation mPower, one of the early leaders in the development of small modular reactors (SMR), has decided to fully terminate its partnership and put the design material that was developed onto a corporate shelf. Though this isn’t specifically good nuclear news, it is an indication that nuclear energy development has many hurdles that it shares…

NRC accepted NuScale’s DCA. Will it complete its review on time? Estimated completion July 2020

Yesterday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission accepted NuScale’s 12,000 page design certification application (DCA). That action starts the safety determination process, which is scheduled to take 40 months. Completed on December 31, 2016 and submitted to the NRC on January 12, 2017, NuScale’s certification application has been subjected to a 60 day checklist review designed to…

ThorCon and Indonesia moving forward smartly on manufactured nuclear plants

Three state-owned Indonesian companies, Pertamina, PLN and INUKI, have completed the ThorCon technology pre-feasibility study agreed to in the Memorandum of Understanding with ThorCon International. The ten-month study concluded that the ThorCon molten salt reactor design could deliver safe, cheap, clean energy, could be built now, would be economically viable, and would have the potential…

Kairos Power Is Hiring For Hybrid Natural Gas-Nuclear Power System

Kairos Power Is Hiring For Hybrid Natural Gas-Nuclear Power System

As long-established nuclear system vendors falter under the weight of challenges that often burden mega-projects, a growing herd of start-up companies envision an exciting future in innovative nuclear solutions to the world’s energy trilemma. One of the newest additions in the space is Kairos Power, an Oakland, CA-based start-up that is quietly assembling a team…