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Category: nuclear energy – Page 58

The TRISO-X, LLC Fuel Fabrication Facility (TF3) will be the nation’s first High-Assay, Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU) fuel fabrication facility. TRISO-X is a wholly owned subsidiary of advanced reactor designer X-energy, LLC. TF3 will use uranium enriched between 5% and 20% to produce fuel for advanced and small modular reactors of the future. TF3 will manufacture TRi-structural ISOtropic (TRISO) fuel, an advanced fuel that is tough enough to handle the higher operating temperatures of several advanced reactors under development.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is supporting the development of TF3 through an award with X-energy, LLC under the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP) 0, which aims to speed the demonstration of advanced reactors through cost-shared partnerships with the U.S. nuclear industry. The design and license application development of TF3 was also supported through an $18M (federal cost share) industry FOA that was awarded to X-energy in 2018. TF3 will initially provide the TRISO fuel for X-energy’s Xe-100 high-temperature gas reactor.

“The TRISO-X Fuel Fabrication Facility represents the intersection of some of DOE’s hard work to bring advanced reactors to commercialization,” said Alice Caponiti, DOE’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Reactor Fleet and Advanced Reactor Deployment. “We’ve been investing in R&D on TRISO fuels for decades. Now, with funding through ARDP, TF3 will bring the next evolution of nuclear fuel to reality, advancing new nuclear technology, creating new jobs, and supporting the clean energy economy.”

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This article is an installment of The Future Explored, a weekly guide to world-changing technology. You can get stories like this one straight to your inbox every Thursday morning by subscribing here.

If nuclear fusion was a viable energy source, everything could be electrified. Electricity would be so cheap that projects that seem impossible now could be within our grasp, like commercial space flights, desalinating sea water, or direct air carbon capture.

Now, researchers from MIT say nuclear fusion — the power source of the sun itself — could become a reality by 2035, thanks to a new compact reactor called Sparc.

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TRISO particles cannot melt in a reactor and can withstand extreme temperatures well beyond the threshold of current nuclear fuels.

There’s a lot of buzz around advanced nuclear.

These technologies are going to completely change the way we think about nuclear reactors.

More than 70 projects are underway in the United States with new designs that are expected to be more economical to build and operate.

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In an unexpected move, on Wednesday, European lawmakers voted to declare some gas and nuclear energy projects “green.” They also agreed that these projects should receive access to cheap loans and even state subsidies, according to a report by The New York Times.

The proposal was made by the European Commission and the lawmakers present at the European Parliament meeting in Strasbourg, France, voted in favor of accepting it, with 328 votes backing the proposal and 278 against it. This decision was much to the dismay of detractors who argue that these projects are not environmentally friendly.

The policy, known as the “taxonomy,” will give the bloc, a group of 27 industrialized and wealthy nations, support as it struggles to replace Russian energy sources in order to penalize the Kremlin for its invasion of Ukraine. It will also aim to thwart “greenwashing”, the practice of labeling projects green that are not truly so.

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The European research consortium EUROfusion has announced the start of a five-year conceptual design phase for its demonstration fusion power plant DEMO, capable of net electricity production, shortly after the middle of the century in its Roadmap to Fusion Energy.

The first-of-its-kind facility represents the next technological step after the global ITER fusion experiment. It aims to demonstrate the net production of 300 to 500 megawatt of electricity generated by nuclear fusion, clean and safe energy, as well as essential technologies such as remote maintenance and tritium breeding. The tritium breeding technology will allow operators to produce the tritium fusion fuel on-site is a crucial requirement not just for DEMO but also for any future fusion power device to follow ITER.

Fusion is the process that powers stars like our Sun and promises an inherently safe and nearly unlimited long-term clean energy source here on Earth. Fusion energy will generate immense amounts of energy from just a few grams of the abundant fuels found all over the world.

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In Latin, nova means “new.” In astronomy, that refers to a temporary bright “star” in the night sky. But the causes of these brief but brilliant stars are varied.

Classical novae occur in a binary star system with a white dwarf and a star close enough together that the white dwarf pulls, or accretes, material from its companion. The material — mostly hydrogen — sits on the surface of the white dwarf until enough has been gathered to kick-start a nuclear fusion reaction, the same process that powers the Sun. As the hydrogen is converted into heavier elements, the temperature increases, which in turn increases the rate of hydrogen burning. At this point, the white dwarf experiences a runaway thermonuclear reaction, ejecting the unburnt hydrogen, which releases 10,000 to 100,000 times the energy our Sun emits in a year. Because the white dwarf remains intact after blowing away this excess, a stellar system can experience multiple classical novae.

Kilonovae occur when two compact objects, like binary neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole, collide. These mergers, as their name suggest, are about 1,000 times brighter than a classical nova, but not as bright as a supernova, which is 10 to 100 times brighter than a kilonova.

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