Ambient outside = 123 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 123 nanosieverts per hour

English cucumbers  from Central Market = 104 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 114 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 95 nanosieverts per hour

Dover Sole from Central = 110 nanosieverts per hour

     Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) has just signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Kyoto Fusioneering Ltd (KF) to collaborate on the delivery of technical services to support the growing international fusion reactor market. The collaborators will have a key focus on testing related to tritium.
     Under the MoU, the CNL will work with KF to help accelerate the progression of fusion as a source of clean energy. The MoU covers cooperation in areas including the exchange of scientific information, the shared use of technical equipment and facilities, the delivery of joint research projects, and the exchange of technical personnel. The collaboration aims to provide fusion developers with better access to testing and demonstration equipment. 
     KF was spun out of Kyoto University in 2019 as Japan’s first fusion start-up company. Their goal is to develop advanced technologies for commercial fusion reactors building on decades of research at the university. One of the advanced technologies the company is developing for commercial fusion is tritium fuel cycle technologies and breeding blankets for tritium production and power generation.
     Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen that will provide the fuel for many fusion reactor designs under development. CNL has a long and extensive history in the development of technologies and systems to safely manage tritium. It operates a dedicated, state-of-the-art Tritium Facility (TF) at its Chalk River Laboratories site in Ontario. The TF was originally constructed to support the tritium technology needs for Candu reactors and to support the Canadian fusion program. The facility is able to handle significant amounts of tritium for research and development.
     Jeff Griffin is the CNL Vice-President of Science and Technology. He said, “CNL is currently exploring plans to establish an internationally unique fusion fuel cycle and demonstration loop at the Chalk River Laboratories campus. This partnership with Kyoto Fusioneering could build on this work and contribute to the setup of a demonstration-scale test loop, which would combine elements of Kyoto Fusioneering’s Unique Integrated Testing Facility (UNITY) concept with CNL’s expertise in the fusion fuel cycle.”
     Taka Nagao is the CEO of KF. He said, “Kyoto Fusioneering is providing solutions for fusion energy based on innovative and unique research from Kyoto University and high quality Japanese industrial technology. The cooperation with CNL will provide a very strong and important contribution to the international development of fusion energy, which has the potential to solve key energy and environmental problems on this planet.”
     Earlier this month, KF signed an agreement with the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority to develop fusion-related technologies. There are also plans to develop a fusion-grade silicon carbide composite material.
     The agreement is the latest in a series of fusion-related projects recently announced by CNL. These include working with private fusion developer General Fusion on joint projects to accelerate the deployment of commercial fusion power in Canada as well as an agreement with U.K.-based First Light Fusion to design a system for extracting tritium from a planned sixty megawatt pilot power plant reactor.
     Joe McBrearty is the President and CEO of CNL. He said, “Our best approach to confront climate change here in Canada and around the world is by working together, and sharing our technical knowledge and resources in the pursuit of next-generation clean energy solutions. That is at the heart of this agreement with Kyoto Fusioneering, an incredibly talented and ambitious company which shares our optimism in fusion power. Working together, we hope to accelerate this promising new technology, by providing fusion vendors with access to the products and services they need to develop, qualify and deploy their technologies.”

Ambient office = 85 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 113 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 118 nanosieverts per hour

Blueberry from Central Market = 115 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 111 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 85 nanosieverts per hour

     EDF is the French utility which builds, operates and sell nuclear fission power reactors. They just announced that they will create a wholly-owned subsidiary which will market their Nuward small modular reactor (SMR). The purpose of this action is to allow the Nuward reactor to meet its “next key milestones” on the way to first pouring of concrete for an power plant in 2030.
     Following the conceptual design phase, EDF said that “Nuward will now proceed with the basic design activities to progress design maturity, leveraging the expertise and experience of EDF Group’s nuclear engineering teams, while also benefiting from the support of an international network of industrial partners”.
     A Design and Safety options file must be submitted to the French Nuclear Safety Authority in July. Discussion and engagement will also take place to assess and select possible sites for the first plant in France.
     The Nuward SMR project was launched in September of 2019 by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), EDF, Naval Group and TechnicAtome. The first Nuward project consists of a three hundred and forty megawatt SMR plant with two pressurized water reactors (PWR) of one hundred and seventy megawatts each. It has been jointly developed using France’s long-term experience with PWRs. The new SMR technology is expected to replace old high CO2-emitting coal, oil and gas power plants around the world. Other applications such as hydrogen production, urban and district heating or desalinization will also be supported.
     Nuward company will continue to work with its long-time partners as well as new partners following its establishment. Its workforce is expected to expand to about one hundred and fifty workers in its core team by 2024. More than six hundred workers in total including partners’ staff will be contributing to the project.
      Renaud Crassous is Nuward’s President. He said the aim was to “fully integrate the SMR catalysts for success, i.e. innovation, modularization, standardization and series production. We are committed to increasing the speed of execution to deliver the Nuward SMR design on time to meet market expectations for first nuclear concrete as early as 2030.”
     Xavier Ursat is the EDF Group Senior Executive in charge of Engineering and New Nuclear Projects Division. He said that as a subsidiary embedded within the EDF Group, Nuward will be “a key enabler for a time-to-market product, providing the agility and speed required to meet the next key milestones”.
     The Nuward is one of a variety of SMRs in development at the moment in different countries and the company hopes to eventually become the European leader in SMR technology. It has already attracted interest elsewhere in Europe. A regulatory agreement was reached last year. This means that the French nuclear safety regulator and Czech and Finnish regulators are collaborating for a pilot European early joining regulatory review.
     According to EDF’s SMR roadmap, the phase involving the detailed design and formal application for a new nuclear facility is scheduled to begin in 2026. This will be followed by pouring the first concrete in France in 2030 with the construction of that first unit anticipate to take about three years.

Ambient office = 63 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 139 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 119 nanosieverts per hour

Tomato from Central Market = 94 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 88 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 77 nanosieverts per hour

     All of the facilities in the world that produce molybdenum-99 (Mo-99) are now using low-enriched uranium (LEU) targets instead of proliferation-sensitive highly-enriched uranium (HEU) targets. Belgium’s National Institute of Radioelements (IRE) medical isotope production facility was the last facility to convert to LEU.
     Mo-99 is the most widely used radioisotope in nuclear medicine for diagnosis. Historically, it was usually produced by irradiating HEU in nuclear reactors and then processing the irradiated materials to extract the Mo-99. This is seen as a serious nuclear proliferation risk.
     A commitment was made at the 2012 National Security Summit for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to provide financial and technical assistance to global producers of Mo-99 for the conversion from HEU to LEU targets. Such conversions were technically complex. They required qualification of new LEU  target for irradiation in nuclear reactors, modifications of specialized equipment for processing irradiated target, and extensive reviews from both nuclear safety and medical regulators.
     South Africa’s NTP Radioisotopes converted to LEU targets in 2017 and the Netherlands’ Curium converted in 2018 with the assistance of the NNSA.  Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization is the fourth largest Mo-99 producer in the world. It has always used LEU targets.
     The IRE is the world’s leading producer of Mo-99. Preliminary consultations between the IRE and the Belgian nuclear regulator, the Federal Agency for Nuclear Control (FANC), on the conversion from HEU to LEU targets began in 2015. The IRE requested in July of 2016 to change its licensing conditions to enable the switch. On the 24th of October 2017, the permit for the development of production with LEU targets was granted by Royal Decree. FANC and its technical subsidiary Bel V approved the beginning of Mo-99 production with LEU targets on the 14th of April 2020. The first batch of Mo-99 utilizing with LEU targets was produced in May of 2020.
    In February of 2021, IRE announced that its first commercial deliveries of iodine-131 (I-131) based on the irradiation of LEU targets had begun. I-131 is used for therapeutic purposes. IRE recently announced that it had completed conversion of its production process to LEU targets. This ended the global civilian use of HEU targets for the production of medical isotopes.
     IRE said, “This complete conversion to a LEU process represents the culmination of years of work and collaboration between the R&D, production, safety, quality assurance and regulatory teams of IRE around an entirely new industrial process for supplying Mo-99 and I-131 to healthcare professionals, without impacting the site’s production capacity. This outcome would not have been possible either, without the upstream collaboration of the research reactors which irradiate the uranium targets, but also downstream thanks to IRE customers who had to modify the application files of their Mo-99 and I-131-based drugs and have them approved.”
     Erich Kollegger is the CEO of IRE. He said, “IRE will continue to innovate in order to contribute even better to saving lives thanks to nuclear medicine applications, while increasing the safety of our processes and our facilities.”
     Jill Hruby is an NNSA Administrator. She said, “For decades, access to life-saving medical isotopes depended on the shipment of proliferation-sensitive nuclear material across continents. With IRE’s production facility converted to LEU, all major producers across the Mo-99 industry can perform their vital work without HEU targets.”
     NNSA is also assisting research reactor operators to convert from HEU to LEU fuel. Some of these reactors provide irradiation services for Mo-99 production. There are six research reactors in the world with a major role in Mo-99 production. Five of them now use LEU fuel. Belgium’s BR2 research reactor is the sixth and it is expected to convert to LEU fuel in 2026. LEU test assemblies are currently being irradiated in the BR2 reactor. This is the final major technical step towards conversion.

Ambient office = 140 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 145 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 143 nanosieverts per hour

Red bell pepper from Central Market = 103 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 106 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 84 nanosieverts per hour