In the context of international organizations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), three international benchmarks focused on the neutronics and thermal-hydraulics of lead-cooled fast reactors (LFR) have been recently launched under the coordination of ENEA.

These last months have witnessed a renewed interest in Italy of industry, and the private sector in general, for nuclear. The reasons behind this are mainly the need to investigate options to help (1) reducing carbon dioxide emissions to cope with climate change issues, (2) decreasing electricity prices, and (3) increasing the security of energy supply by lowering the current reliance on foreign natural gas imports. 

During shutdown inspection, the Licensee noticed that several welds at the valve were broken, causing one of the parts to end up in the primary circuit. 

The DEBORA benchmark is an international programme that aims to find a more unified methodology for testing and validating Computational Multiphase Fluid Dynamics (CMFD) models.

PSI has a unique (worldwide) environment for the investigation of highly radioactive / toxic materials:

• Materials (different fuel types, very high burn-up, different cladding materials, materials activated in SINQ)
• the hot lab with advanced tools for microsample analysis and preparation
• the large-scale equipment for advanced material analysis

NIRAS/ONDRAF, the Belgian National Agency for Radioactive Waste and Fissile Materials, was granted a license for the construction and exploitation of a Near-Surface Disposal facility for disposal of low and intermediate level short lived radioactive waste. 

EURAD activities cover high priority common interests of different actors involved in safe radioactive waste management. One of the EURAD work packages, WP2 ACED, is devoted to Assessment of Chemical Evolution of ILW and HLW Disposal Cells.

The increasing risk of extended electricity supply disruptions and severe electricity price fluctuations  strongly motivate an evaluation of electricity supply resilience. In this direction, this research proposes a multicriteria decision support framework to assess resilience at a country level, based on three major dimensions: Resist, Restabilize and Recover. In total, 35 European countries are ranked according to their performance on 17 indicators, through a synergy of MCDA methods, techniques and communication protocols. The assessment framework has been extended to incorporate the Choquet Integral method, in order to accommodate potentially interacting pairs of criteria and negate their arbitrary effects on the final evaluation results. The analysis incorporates country data from credible international databases, as well as the preference information of a European energy expert. The results are envisaged to support energy policymakers in Europe and provide guidelines and areas for improvement at a country level.

On 15 April 2023, the last nuclear power plants in Germany will be shut down. This will mark the end of the history of electricity production from nuclear power after more than 60 years: in June 1961, the Kahl experimental nuclear power plant fed electricity generated by nuclear energy into the West German grid for the first time; five years later, the Rheinsberg nuclear power plant was the first commercially used nuclear power plant in the GDR. The six decades of nuclear power use were initially marked by euphoria, then increasingly by scepticism and rejection. This article, however, focuses less on social or political aspects than on (safety) technical aspects.

During the last decades, computing power has been subject to tremendous progress due to the shrinking of transistor size as predicted by Moore’s law. However, as we approach the physical limits of this scaling, alternative techniques have to be deployed to increase computing performance. In this regard, the next big advance is envisioned to be the usage of approximate computing hardware based on field-programmable gate arrays and/or digital-analogue in-memory circuits. Such approximate computing can provide disproportional gain (x1000) in energy efficiency and/or execution time for acceptable loss of simulation accuracy.