Carnival of Nuclear Energy 314

1. Euan Mearns – the UK’s contest for Government support to SMR development, which has been published at Euan Mearn’s “Energy Matters” blog.

HMG is making £250 million ($360 million) available in support for the winner of the contest

Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) fall into a number of major classes. A short run through these is in order:

Light Water Reactors (LWRs)
Liquid Metal-cooled Reactors (LMRs)
High Temperature Reactors (HTRs)
Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs)
“Nuclear Batteries”

2. Forbes, James Conca – Energy Inequality – Trump Versus The Common Man Or Medieval Lord Versus Peasant

The growing disparity of wealth today has many parallels with the unequal societies that emerged in the Middle Ages, where wealth and power resided primarily in the hands of a few feudal lords including kings, dukes and assorted noblemen. But wealth inequality is not the same as energy inequality. And that is the primary difference between economic inequality in present-day America and Medieval Europe. Wealth inequality is still about a factor of a million, but energy inequality is down to a factor of about ten. And that is because energy has never been so cheap and plentiful in the history of humankind as it is today.

3. Neutron Bytes- Dan Yurman – Idaho Settlement Agreement?

When the nuclear waste cleanup deal was agreed to more than a decade ago, no one was thinking about small modular reactors.

4. Nextbigfuture – Sweden will build ten new nuclear reactors and update on new nuclear reactors from 2015 to 2020

Sweden says it will build up to 10 new reactors in the coming years. Currently Sweden has nine functional reactors at three nuclear power plants, which generated 38 percent of the electricity used in the country in 2014.

2016 BP oil world energy report showed that all of the nuclear output increase in 2015 was from China increasing nuclear power.

Global nuclear output grew by 1.3 percent in 2015 with China (+28.9 percent) accounting for all the net increase, the 65th edition of the BP Statistical Review of World Energy says. China passed South Korea to become the fourth largest supplier of nuclear power, while EU output (-2.2 percent) fell to the lowest level since 1992. The review, which looks at 2015, says nuclear power accounted for 4.4 percent of global primary energy consumption. Global primary energy consumption increased by just one percent in 2015, similar to growth in 2014 (+1.1 percent), but much slower than the 10-year average of 1.9 percent a year. Oil remained the world’s leading fuel, accounting for 32.9 percent of global energy consumption, and gaining market share for the first time since 1999. Coal remained the second largest fuel by market share (29.2 percent), but was the only fuel that lost global market share in 2015