The new economic stimulus proposal that has been approved by Congress includes roughly $35.2 billion for energy initiatives, according to summary documents seen by TechCrunch. “This is probably the biggest energy bill we’ve seen in a decade,” said policy analyst Dr. Leah Stokes, an Assistant Professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management …
The Canadian government has released a national Small Modular Reactor (SMR) Action Plan, which responds to the 53 recommendations identified in the country’s SMR Roadmap that was launched in November 2018. The plan lays out the next steps for the development, demonstration and deployment of SMRs for multiple applications at home and abroad. According to …
Nuclear power capacity able to supply roughly 60 million homes is scheduled to close this decade as utilities struggle to replace northwest Europe’s ageing reactors, raising the risk of higher carbon emissions as fossil fuels plug the gap. Nuclear power provides around a quarter of the European Union’s electricity generation, with 15 of the 27 …
Last weekend, Russian nuclear power plants (branches of Rosenergoatom JSC, part of the Electric Power Division of Rosatom) fulfilled ahead of schedule the annual state task of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) to generate electricity in the amount of 207.614 billion kWh. During the same period in 2019, 202.124 billion kWh were generated. Despite a …
The Canadian government has launched a strategy that sees low-carbon and zero-emission hydrogen fuel technology as a key part of the nation’s path to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The strategy is underpinned by a federal investment of CAD1.5 billion (USD1.2 billion) in a Low-carbon and Zero-emissions Fuels Fund to increase the production and use …
Researchers show that deep reinforcement learning can be used to design more efficient nuclear reactors. In this AI-designed layout for a boiling water reactor, fuel rods are ideally positioned around two fixed water rods to burn more efficiently. MIT researchers ran the equivalent of 36,000 simulations to find the optimal configurations, which could extend the …
Nuclear-produced hydrogen, using electrolyser technology, could have a “sizeable contribution” to make in the development of the hydrogen economy, according to a new report from the New Nuclear Watch Institute (NNWI) think-tank. However, it says the realisation of those benefits will depend on the adoption of technology-neutral policies, which do not discriminate against nuclear power. …
The world’s largest operating uranium mine will be temporarily suspended, further disrupting a market “already coiled like a spring”. In 2020, COVID-19 interruptions to uranium supply has doubled the structural deficit – the difference between supply and demand — to 40 million pounds. That’s more than 20 per cent of annual uranium consumption. Yesterday, major …
Canadian uranium miner Cameco has opted to temporarily suspend operations are its Cigar Lake operation in northern Saskatchewan, Canada, due to increasing risks posed by COVID-19. The company said that the entire province has been experiencing a “significant negative trend in the pandemic” that has left Cameco uncertain for the mine’s continuous operation as the pool of …
The levelised costs of electricity generation of low-carbon generation technologies are falling and are increasingly below the costs of conventional fossil fuel generation, according to a report by the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) and the International Energy Agency (IEA). The cost of electricity from new nuclear power plants remains stable, yet electricity from the …
