Ambient office = 81 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 87 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 90 nanosieverts per hour

Avocado from Central Market = 93 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 88 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 74 nanosieverts per hour

Dover Sole from Central = 99 nanosieverts per hour

     Bruce Power just announced that it is launching an Expression of Interest (EOI) process to “further understand nuclear technologies that could help meet growing demand for clean electricity and advance decarbonization efforts in Ontario”. Last July, the Canadian provincial government said that it was beginning pre-development work to build up to four thousand eight hundred megawatts of new nuclear capacity at Bruce Power’s existing site.
     The company said that the EOI process will provide an opportunity for nuclear technology suppliers to engage and express their interest in participation in the potential Bruce site expansion. This will also enable Bruce Power and industry partners to evaluate a variety of nuclear energy technologies, “which would leverage Canada’s robust nuclear supply chain, ensure the best interests of the ratepayer, include Indigenous community considerations, and increase socioeconomic benefits for the Clean Energy Frontier region of Bruce, Grey and Huron counties”.
      Mike Rencheck is the Bruce Power President and CEO. He said, “Ontario has one of the cleanest electricity grids in the world and as we look to meet increased demand from continued electrification and economic growth in the province, nuclear power will be essential to preserving this advantage. Bruce Power is uniquely positioned for potential expansion, with decades of experience, a well-studied site, significant space for expansion, strong community support and an experienced workforce.”
      Rencheck went on to say that “Canada’s nuclear industry supports 76,000 well-paying, highly skilled jobs, generating billions in GDP annually while providing a vital supply of carbon-free electricity to advance our climate targets. As we assess potential expansion options, we will lean on the knowledge and skills of our industry, built through more than a half century of operational experience.”
      The Ontario government outlined its support for the project in its Powering Ontario’s Growth Plan which was launched in early July. Bruce Power is in the pre-planning states of the federally-regulated Impact Assessment (IA) process. During this phase, Bruce Power will look at nuclear expansion options on the site. The company mentioned that the IA process includes Indigenous and public engagement. It will formally begin with the submission of an Initial Project Description to the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada in the coming months.
     Bruce Power is located in the traditional and treaty territory of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation as well as the harvesting territories of the Métis Nation of Ontario and the Historic Saugeen Métis. It said that it is collaborating with Indigenous-owned Makwa Development on the IA. It will look for further procurement opportunities for Indigenous companies through its Indigenous Procurement Policy and Indigenous Relations Supplier Network.  
     Bruce Power is also working with Ontario Power Generation (OPG) and the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) to develop a feasibility study for potential future nuclear generation in Ontario, which may leverage information from the EOI.
     Bruce Power said, “As Bruce Power evaluates clean technology opportunities, it will engage with independent, non-profit energy R&D institute EPRI and the Nuclear Innovation Institute, an independent, not-for-profit organization that provides a platform for accelerating the pace of innovation in the nuclear industry.”
     The Ontario government has already implemented a plan to meet rising electricity demand in the current decade. However, in 2022 IESO issued a report forecasting that the province could need to more than double its electricity generating capacity from today’s forty two thousand megawatts to eighty eight thousand megawatts by 2050.
     Bruce Power’s eight existing Candu reactors already produce about thirty percent of Ontario’s electricity. The company has said that the site has space for “incremental infrastructure development”.

Ambient office = 81 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 74 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 73 nanosieverts per hour

Zuccinni from Central Market = 108 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 70 nanosieverts per hour

     An Australian-led international research team, including a core group of Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization (ANSTO) scientists has found that doping a promising material provides a simple, effective method capable of extracting uranium from seawater.
     The research, published in Energy Advances, could help in designing new materials that are highly selective for uranium, efficient, and cost effective. Uranium is a highly valued mineral used as a fuel for nuclear reactors around the globe.
     Dr. Jessica Veliscek Carolan is a lead scientist who supervised co-author honors student Hayden Ou of UNSW with Dr. Nicolas Bedford of UNSW. He said, “There’s a lot of uranium in the oceans, more than a thousand times more than what is found in the ground, but it’s really diluted, so it’s very difficult to extract. The main challenge is that other substances in seawater, salt and minerals, such as iron and calcium, are present in much higher amounts than uranium.”
     First author of the report Mohammed Zubair receive a grant for the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering (AINSE) to support his research at ANSTO.
     Layered double hydroxides are materials that have attracted interest for their ability to remove metals. They are fairly easy to make and can be modified to improve the way they work. These layers have positive and negative charges so they can be tailored to captures specific substances such as uranium. Lanthanide dopants, neodymium, europium and terbium were among the materials tested.
      Adding neodymium to layered double hydroxides (LDHs) enhanced their ability to selectively capture uranium from seawater, a highly challenging process that scientists have been working on for a long time.
     Synthesized materials were characterized using a variety of techniques. These include scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) at ANSTO’s microscopy facility by Dr. Daniel Oldfield and at UNSW by Yuwei Yang.
     When neodymium was added to LDHs (MgAINd), these materials bonded with uranium over ten other more abundant elements found in real seawater. A crucial finding of the tests was that the dopant, neodymium, changes the way that uranium binds to the LDHs.
     The research team also used X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) and Soft X-ray spectroscopy at ANSTO’s Australian Synchrotron. They sought to clarify the octahedral coordination environment, oxidation state and adsorption mechanism, respectively.
     X-ray measurements showed that under real seawater conditions, the extraction of uranium occurred through a process where uranium atoms formed complexes on the surface of the LDHs by replacing nitrate ions in the LDH layers with uranyl carbonate anions from the seawater. By adding neodymium and other lanthanide elements to the LDH structure, the chemical bonding between uranium and oxygen in the LDH became more iconic. The improved ionic bonding made these materials much better at selective binding to uranium via interactions with ionic surfaces.
     The authors pointed out that the study demonstrated a way to adjust how well a material can capture uranium which could lead to creating new materials that are even superior at separating uranium from other substances. The materials tested were not just useful for taking uranium from seawater but also had the potential to clear up uranium from radioactive wastewater near nuclear power plants. Dr. Carolan said, “There are additional benefits in that these materials are simple and inexpensive to make, making them a cost-effective choice for large-scale uranium extraction.”

Ambient office = 86 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 122 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 122 nanosieverts per hour

White onion from Central Market = 180 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 75 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 67 nanosieverts per hour

Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
     Ian Chapman is the CEO of the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority. He said that there had been an ageing workforce in the U.K. ten years ago. However, a training push over the past decade meant that more than half the workforce was now under forty. He added that steps had been taken to ensure the experience and knowledge built up over the past decades at JET would not be lost when it switches to its decommissioning phase at the end of the year.
    Andrew Bowie is the U.K. Nuclear Minister. He outlined details of the U.K.’s Fusion Futures Program (FFP). He said that the FFP would see seven hundred ninety-three million dollars spent over the next five years on a package of measures. These measures will include the creation of two thousand two hundred training places, a new fuel cycle testing facility and funding to develop infrastructure for private fusion companies. UKAEA’s Culham campus will be included. He said, “We have a golden opportunity to be at the cutting-edge of fusion and lead the way in its commercialization as the ultimate clean energy source.”
      There was much discussion of collaboration being key in the future. Chapman was asked about the U.K. government’s decision not to continue as part of the ITER project. He said that the U.K. was still involved in some work that predated the Brexit-related end of new contracts. He added that the U.K. and ITER had a “lot to offer” and both hoped to continue to collaborate and hoped for success “as soon as possible”.
      Barabaschi said that ITER itself continued to work on the project’s revised timeline. He noted that the new timeline was expected to be agreed upon and announced in mid-2024. The original timeline was agreed upon in 2016. It called for first plasma in 2025 but that it is now set to be substantially delayed. He added that the timeline update would “not be good news but we will go ahead, and we will succeed, I’m very sure about that”.
     The Eurofusion consortium of fusion laboratories around Europe ran experiments at JET in 2021 designed to explore extreme conditions expected at ITER and future fusion plants such as reaching a temperature of one hundred and fifty million degrees million Celsius. Costanza Maggi is a UKAEA fellow and former JET Task Force Leader. He said, “One of our most eye-catching results is the first direct observation of the fusion fuel keeping itself hot through alpha heating. This is the process where high-energy helium ions (alpha particles) coming out of the fusion reaction transfer their heat to the surrounding fuel mix to keep the fusion process going. Studying this process under realistic conditions is crucial to developing fusion power plant.”
     Eurofusion also said that the experiments “confirmed predictions from advanced computer models for heat transport inside the plasma, which are crucial to extrapolate results from current experimental setups to larger future machines like ITER and the demonstration fusion power plant DEMO”.