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The U.S. brings a new Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear reactor online in Georgia, the first in 7 years, signaling a potential nuclear renaissance.Historical fears and incidents hindered nuclear development, but changing perceptions and energy needs have positioned nuclear as a clean energy solution.While challenges like high costs and lengthy development times persist, political support, funding, and improving public opinion could drive a resurgence in U.S. nuclear energy.Following the energy shortages of 2022, the U.S. has been racing to reinvigorate its nuclear energy sector. Long neglected, nuclear power appears to be making a comeback in the U.S., having gained funding and political...

Molten Salt Reactors enjoy 15 minutes of fame 11 June 2014   Print Email   A next-generation fast breeder reactor design is gaining popularity in research circles.On 6 June, UK researchers Jasper Tomlinson and Trevor Griffiths won £75,000 in Technology Strategy Board funding (including £20,000 of contributions-in-kind) to carry out an eight-month feasibility study.The project, which will be managed by mechanical engineer Rory O'Sullivan, aims to develop a ranking of alternatives and configurations of a liquid-fuelled molten-salt reactor, including costs, regulatory, public acceptance and site issues for building and licensing a pilot-scale demonstration reactor in the UK. It would...

Dubai -- A US Navy warship fired a warning flare to wave off an Iranian Revolutionary Guard speedboat coming straight at it during a tense encounter in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, officials said Tuesday. The incident on Monday involving the Guard and the Navy comes as tensions remain high over stalled negotiations over Iran's tattered nuclear deal with world powers and as Tehran enriches uranium closer than ever to weapons-grade levels under decreasing international oversight. Meanwhile, the United Nations' nuclear watchdog said Iran now plans to enrich uranium through a second set of advanced centrifuges at its underground Fordo...

The U.S. Air Force recently announced that it has picked Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska as the base to host a new small nuclear reactor as part of a pilot program. The U.S. military, as a whole, together with the Department of Energy has been increasingly looking into micro-reactor designs as possible ways to meet ever-growing electricity demands, including for units on the battlefield, as well as to help cut costs and improve general operational efficiency by reducing reliance on fossil fuels. The Department of the Air Force announced the selection of Eielson as the host facility for this...

Chinese government scientists have unveiled plans for a first-of-its-kind, experimental nuclear reactor that does not need water for cooling. The molten-salt nuclear reactor, which runs on liquid thorium rather than uranium, is expected to be safer than traditional reactors because the molten salt cools and solidifies quickly when exposed to the air, insulating the thorium, so that any potential leak would spill much less radiation into the surrounding environment compared with leaks from traditional reactors. The prototype reactor is expected to be completed next month, with the first tests beginning as early as September. This will pave the way for...

KIEV (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 01st February, 2020) The power unit No. 3 of the Rivne nuclear power plant (NPP) in northwestern Ukraine got disconnected from the power grid on Saturday, state company Energoatom said, adding that causes behind the incident were yet to be established. "On February 1, 2020, at 2:24 a.m. [00:24 GMT], unit No. 3 of the Rivne NPP got disconnected from the power grid. The reactor facility is operating at 35 percent of its rated capacity. The causes of the shutdown are being investigated," the company's website said. Power units No. 2 and 4 with...

JERUSALEM — Israel's government on Wednesday publicly confirmed for the first time that it had carried out an audacious 2007 strike against a reactor in Syria that could have produced nuclear weapons fuel, lifting a decade of secrecy surrounding the episode. The country's leaders used the occasion to warn that, if necessary, Israel would not hesitate to launch similar strikes again. "The government of Israel, the IDF and the Mossad prevented Syria from developing a nuclear capability," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, referring to the Israel Defense Forces and the country’s spy agency. "Israel's policy has been and remains consistent...

“From the pictures taken today, it is obvious that some melted objects came out of the reactor. This means something of high temperature melted some structural objects and came out. So it is natural to think that melted fuel rods are mixed with them,” said Takahiro Kimoto, a Tepco spokesman. “In that sense, it is possible that the melted objects found this time are melted fuel debris or probably around it,” he said, saying the utility will think about how they can be analyzed to determine if they are the former fuel rods. This is the first time Tepco has...

Sunday's Der Spiegel had a massive expose on the continuing efforts of Bashar al-Assad to build a nuclear weapons plant, which included evidence that Iran is constructing such a plant for Syria in Qusayr, less than two kilometers from Syria's border with Lebanon. The issue came up in the State Department's Monday daily briefing. Disturbingly, spokeswoman Marie Harf said that the United States did not plan to raise the issue in the Iranian nuclear talks, claiming that those talks only deal with Iran's nuclear capabilities and not with Syria's. According to findings of Western intelligence agencies, however, the situation...

At least six entities in the United States or Canada (TerraPower, ARC, GE Prism, LeadCold, Oklo and Westinghouse) are investing significant sums of corporate or venture capital to pursue an elusive technical achievement; commercially viable nuclear power systems that achieve substantially greater fuel economy than conventional reactors. Though nuclear fuel is “cheap,” substantially better fuel use provides improved longevity and produces less waste material. Efforts to achieve fuel economy objectives have reopened a discussion whose historical roots extend back more than 50 years into the middle of the 1960s. Given that there are United States entities that believe there is...

The radiation levels at Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant are now at "unimaginable" levels. Adam Housley, who reported from the area in 2011 following the catastrophic triple-meltdown, said this morning that new fuel leaks have been discovered. He said the radiation levels - as high as 530 sieverts per hour - are now the highest they've been since 2011 when a tsunami hit the coastal reactor. "To put this in very simple terms. Four sieverts can kill a handful of people," he explained. He said that critics, including the U.S. military in 2011, have long questioned whether Tokyo Electric...

A record radiation level has been detected inside the No. 2 reactor at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex, with the estimated reading of up to 530 sieverts per hour, the plant operator said Thursday. The reading means a person could die from even brief exposure, highlighting the difficulties ahead as the government and Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. grope their way toward dismantling all three reactors that melted down in the March 2011 nuclear disaster. The plant operator also announced that based on an image analysis, a 1-square-meter hole has been found on a metal grating beneath the...

ITS CUPOLA dully glinting in the sun, across kilometres of an exclusion zone in the Negev Desert, the nuclear reactor near the Israeli town of Dimona has for decades been the subject of intense speculation. Its bland official name, the Centre for Nuclear Research, belies a martial purpose. Foreign intelligence services, atomic scientists and a former Israeli employee claim that it is the source of fissile material used to make Israel’s nuclear weapons. The country’s atomic secrets have always been closely guarded, so little is known about the plant at Dimona. However, officials at the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC)...

      Aktuell   China's participation in atomic smuggling Fissionable material for the coalition by  Matthias Gebauer The new dislosures about China's role in the sale of nuclear know-how has the discussions over the export of the Hanau fuel element plant boiling up again. Some Greens are threatening openly with the end of the coalition if Chancellor Schröder allows the deal to go through. MARCO-URBAN.DE Governing-Team Schröder/Fischer: Looking for a solution without losing face. Berlin - Green party leader Angelika Beer didn't want to say much about the Hanau topic during her press conference on Monday. "There isn't any new position",...

Israel is not a party to the just signed Geneva Agreement, which includes the United States, Russia, China, UK, France, and Germany; she may decide to bomb the Arak reactor and thereby eliminate one certain route for Iran to gain a nuclear weapon. Recall that India's 1974 nuclear test explosion used Pu-239 made in the CIRUS "research" reactor, which had been constructed in the 1950s with US-Canadian assistance. Israel has a lot of experience in destroying such reactors. In 1981 they bombed Osiris, a similar reactor under construction with French help in Iraq. In September 2007, in Operation "Mivtza Bustan"...

Molten Salt Reactors enjoy 15 minutes of fame 11 June 2014   Print Email   A next-generation fast breeder reactor design is gaining popularity in research circles.On 6 June, UK researchers Jasper Tomlinson and Trevor Griffiths won £75,000 in Technology Strategy Board funding (including £20,000 of contributions-in-kind) to carry out an eight-month feasibility study.The project, which will be managed by mechanical engineer Rory O'Sullivan, aims to develop a ranking of alternatives and configurations of a liquid-fuelled molten-salt reactor, including costs, regulatory, public acceptance and site issues for building and licensing a pilot-scale demonstration reactor in the UK. It would...

The United States says experts have removed the last batch of uranium from Vietnam that terrorists could have used in efforts to make a nuclear bomb. U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz says the highly enriched uranium, from the Dalat Nuclear Research Institute, has gone to Russia where it will be turned into low-enriched reactor fuel. …

Lockheed Martin has announced that their celebrated engineers in their hi tech Skunk Works technology shop have created a design for a small fusion reactor that could fit in the back of a large truck. The breakthrough could mean that clean, nearly unlimited energy might be just over the horizon. The discovery could virtually reinvent the world in the same way that the telephone, the jet engine, and the silicon chip have done over the years. Or not. They don't expect to have a working commercial reactor for a decade and there's no guarantee of success. Still, the Skunk...

Bill Gates-Backed TerraPower And Toshiba Are Talking TerraPower, a company that develops reactors powered by depleted uranium, is in talks with Toshiba in view of developing a small nuclear reactor. TerraPower is a unit of Intellectual Ventures, a patent holding investment firm partially backed by Bill Gates and run out of Bellevue, Wash., by former Microsoft executive, Nathan Myhrvold. Japan’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun first reported the news. In this recent interview with Cnet News Gates discusses his investments in cleantech and in TerraPower. A Toshiba spokesman confirmed the discussions, reports the Wall Street Journal. He said the talks were at...

Post-tsunami reconstruction and radiation cleanup could take 10 years, but officials say something has been permanently lost Nearly three years after a major earthquake, tsunami and nuclear radiation leak devastated coastal and inland areas of Japan's Fukushima prefecture, 175 miles north-east of Tokyo, Namie has become a silent town of ghosts and absent lives. Namie's 21,000 residents remain evacuated because of continuing high radiation levels, the product of the March 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, six miles to the south. Homes, shops and streets are deserted except for the occasional police patrol or checkpoint.