- Ukraine: Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant initiates reactor shutdown following water leak, reports IAEA UN News
- Russian-Occupied Nuclear Plant In Ukraine Reconnected To Main Power Line, Averting Possible Blackout Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty
- Kyiv says Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant switched to reserve power line Reuters
- Ukraine says Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant lost connection to main power line Anadolu Agency | English
- Ukrainian Minister Warns Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Plant ‘One Step Away’ From Blackout Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: reactor
Rolls-Royce unveils early design for space nuclear reactor
A new image shows a possible version of future space propulsion.
Nuclear fission systems, which harness the energy released in the splitting of atoms, could be used to power astronaut bases on the moon or Mars. Or they could help shorten the travel time to the Red Planet, which takes six to nine months to reach with current-generation propulsion systems.
Rolls-Royce could be a part of that ambitious spaceflight future. The venerable company released an early-stage design of a micro-nuclear reactor on Friday (Jan. 27), in the wake of a 2021 agreement (opens in new tab) with the United Kingdom Space Agency to study future nuclear power options in space exploration.
“Each uranium particle is encapsulated in multiple protective layers that act as a containment system, allowing it to withstand extreme conditions,” Rolls-Royce tweeted (opens in new tab) in a brief description of the system.
Related: NASA funds nuclear probes for icy moons, huge new space telescopes and other far-out tech ideas
Nuclear systems have long flown on robotic space missions. For example, radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) provide electricity for many probes, including NASA’s Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft, which are currently exploring interstellar space. Big NASA Mars rovers like Perseverance and Curiosity also use RTGs, though smaller rovers such as Spirit and Opportunity went with solar panels.
But RTGs are not fission reactors. Rather, they are nuclear batteries, converting to electricity the heat thrown off by the decay of radioactive material. Nuclear fission has yet to power a spacecraft off Earth, though that could change soon; for example, NASA and DARPA recently announced plans to build a nuclear thermal rocket by 2027.
Nuclear fusion — the power source of the sun and other stars, which flows from the merging of atoms — could also one day be part of humanity’s spaceflight portfolio. That possible future is a long-term one, however; our species has yet to harness this power source here on Earth. (But U.S. scientists did announce a big breakthrough recently: a fusion experiment that produced more energy than it consumed.)
Speaking generally, some of the concerns of space fission or fusion power include safety for astronauts; portability, as more mass means a more expensive mission; and longevity in a harsh and rugged environment.
But nuclear power is a staple of space exploration nonetheless, both in reality and in science fiction. The technology even helped fuel a joke in the 2015 movie “The Martian.” In the film, astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) — in search of warmth in an unheated rover and desperately digging up a reactor buried in regolith for safety reasons — said his Red Planet training manual had a section about surface operations labeled “Don’t Dig Up The Big Box of Plutonium, Mark.”
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Why Am I Taller (opens in new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).
Rolls Royce Teases Nuclear Reactor That Could Power A Moon Base
This is not investment advice. The author has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Wccftech.com has a disclosure and ethics policy.
After the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) partnered with the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) earlier this week to develop a nuclear rocket engine, British aerospace firm Rolls-Royce also jumped into the fray. Rolls Royce is one of the world’s leading aeronautics and engine firms, with its products found in both military and civilian aircraft – alongside submarines and other machines.
The company also has a space segment, and it shared a rather tantalizing teaser on its social media yesterday showing a micro nuclear reactor. Nuclear propulsion these days, particularly for civilian and peaceful uses, is aiming to use High-Assay, Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU) and it appears that Rolls-Royce’s engine will also utilize this fuel.
Rolls-Royce’s Tantalizing Reactor Render Leaves Mind Begging For More
The central message of the NASA and DARPA announcement was that the agencies have settled down on a safe fuel for using nuclear rocket engines. These engines already exist and are used in aircraft carriers and submarines – predominantly by the U.S. military. However, the fuel used by these engines is highly radioactive and can also be used to make weapons. Naturally, this presents a complication for aerospace usage since the stakes are higher, and the missions are often further away from potential help should there be a problem.
Rolls-Royce is one company that is aiming at building nuclear reactors as well. It has been working on a small modular reactor (SMR) since 2015 and aims to bring it online by 2029. This reactor is part of the United Kingdom’s Energy Security Strategy, which aims to shift towards low-carbon energy sources by 2030. The brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine has played a decisive role in these developments, as the U.K. has been one of the hardest-hit countries due to the painful inflation resulting from Europe’s energy imbalance.
Each SMR is slated to generate at least 470 megawatts of electricity and cost a cool $3 billion initially. Impressively, the Rolls-Royce SMR is also the most potent SMR currently either launched or under licensing. Three have already finished production and are operational, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Two of these are in Russia and the third is in China.
Rolls-Royce’s teaser shows what is potentially an extension of the SMR. The firm calls it a ‘Rolls-Royce Micro-Reactor’, and the power plant should be part of the company’s potential product portfolio to power human presence on the Moon. A Micro-Reactor isn’t the only product in Rolls-Royce’s portfolio, as the firm is also working on a ramjet engine and a power plant that aims to use naturally decaying radioactive material to generate power.
Additionally, Rolls-Royce is also working on a nuclear rocket engine for a two-stage rocket for launch, according to its head of innovation, Mr. Jake Thompson, who explains:
Right now over here at Rollys-Royce we have over 60 engineers and scientists working on these amazing technologies for space exploration. We’re currently working on the early concept design development and testing phase, both for our two-stage to orbit system and our nuclear systems. We’ve already built a small-scale prototype demonstrator of our space reactor, and by 2029, we’ll have a reactor ready to send to the Moon.
The company is also working with the U.K. Space Agency to explore the role of nuclear power in space exploration. Rolls-Royce’s testing is currently focused on ten heaters (potentially heat pipes) and the effect of power generation on their temperature, alongside investigating the effect on the overall engine head temperature. It also covers evaluating engine voltage and the corresponding engine power and system load. Additionally, it is also possible that the firm is using a Stirling engine in its power system. NASA and the Los Alamos National Laboratory demonstrated a similar concept in 2012.
While nuclear engines sound like a novel concept these days, NASA has already conducted six successful tests so far. All of these took place in the 1960s and were part of the agency’s plans to explore Mars and the solar system. These tests used the Kiwi engine prototype and applied it to the Nuclear Engine Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA) program. The NERVA test achieved a specific impulse that went as high as 701 seconds, with theoretical impulse in vacuum estimated even to cross 900 seconds. The tests were also extremely successful and ran without any problems surfacing.
In astronautics, specific impulse is the holy grail of engine design and performance. It essentially calculated the thrust (power) generated per unit of time by a unit of mass. This makes it a unit of efficiency, as engines that generate more thrust with less mass are more efficient and reduce the weight of the overall rocket. For comparison with the NERVA engine, the RS-25, responsible for powering the Space Shuttle and NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, is one of the most efficient rocket engines in the world but has nearly half as much impulse as the NERVA – with a reading of 462 seconds. SpaceX’s Raptor 2, on the other hand, is aiming at 382 seconds.
Oddities in nuclear reactor measurements not due to a new particle
Enlarge / A diagram of the array of detectors in STEREO (left) and its location near a nuclear reactor (right).
Loris Scola – CEA
Neutrinos are probably the strangest particles we know about. They’re far, far lighter than any other particle with mass and only interact with other matter via the weak force—which means they barely ever interact with anything. Three types (or flavors) of neutrinos have been identified, and any individual particle doesn’t have a fixed identity. Instead, it can be viewed as a quantum superposition of all three flavors and will oscillate among these identities.
As if all that weren’t enough, a set of strange measurements has suggested that there could be a fourth type of neutrino that doesn’t even interact via the weak force, making it impossible to detect. These “sterile neutrinos” could potentially explain the tiny masses of the other neutrinos, as well as the existence of dark matter, but the whole “impossible to detect” thing makes it difficult to address their existence directly.
The strongest hints of their presence come from odd measurement results in experiments with other flavors of neutrinos. But a new study today rules out sterile neutrinos as an explanation for one of these oddities—even while confirming that the anomalous results are real.
Spotting the undetectable
We can detect the existence of particles in two ways: They either interact with other matter directly, or they decay into one or more particles that do. That’s what makes sterile neutrinos undetectable. They’re fundamental particles and shouldn’t decay into anything. They also only interact with other matter via gravity, and their low masses make detection via this route an impossibility.
Instead, we can potentially detect them via the oscillations of neutrinos. You can set up an experiment that produces a specific type of neutrinos at a known rate and then try to detect those neutrinos. If there are sterile neutrinos, some of the neutrinos you produced will oscillate into that identity and, thus, go undetected. So you end up measuring fewer neutrinos than you’d expect.
That’s exactly what has been happening at nuclear reactors. One of the products of a radioactive decay (which is driven by the weak force) is a neutrino, so nuclear reactors produce copious amounts of these particles. Measurements with detectors placed nearby, however, picked up about 6 percent fewer neutrinos than expected. A rapid oscillation into sterile neutrinos could explain that discrepancy.
But these experiments are really difficult. Neutrinos interact with detectors so rarely that only a tiny fraction of those produced get registered. And nuclear reactors are incredibly complex environments. Even if you start with a pure sample of a single radioactive isotope, decays quickly turn things into a complicated mix of new elements, some radioactive, some not. The neutrons released can also convert the reactor equipment into new isotopes that may be radioactive. So, it’s tough to know exactly how many neutrinos you’re producing to start with and the exact fraction of the ones you produce that will get registered by your detector.
For all those reasons, it’s tough to be certain that any anomalies in neutrino measurements are real. Physicists tend to take a wait-and-see attitude toward indications that something strange is going on.
Latest success from Google’s AI group: Controlling a fusion reactor
Enlarge / Plasma inside the tokamak at the EPFL.
As the world waits for construction of the largest fusion reactor yet, called ITER, smaller reactors with similar designs are still running. These reactors, called tokamaks, help us test both hardware and software. The hardware testing helps us refine things like the materials used for container walls or the shape and location of control magnets.
But arguably, the software is the most important. To enable fusion, the control software of a tokamak has to monitor the state of the plasma it contains and respond to any changes by making real-time adjustments to the system’s magnets. Failure to do so can result in anything from a drop in energy (which leads to the failure of any fusion) to seeing the plasma spill out of containment (and scorch the walls of the container).
Getting that control software right requires a detailed understanding of both the control magnets and the plasma the magnets manipulate. Or it would be more accurate to say, getting that control software right has required. Because today, Google’s DeepMind AI team is announcing that its software has been successfully trained to control a tokamak.
Out of control
Developing the control software for a tokamak is a complicated process. Based on past experience with similar designs, engineers can extract some of the basic principles needed for the software to function, like what sensor inputs to read and how to respond to changes in them. But there are always quirks based on the design of the hardware and energies of the plasma being used. So, there tends to be an iterative process of measuring and modeling, followed by tweaks to the control process, all the while keeping the performance sufficient to make adjustments in near real time.
The resulting control software tends to be fairly specialized. If researchers want to experiment with a very different geometry for the plasma in the tokamak, a significant revision to the software may be required.
Researchers in the field had already identified artificial intelligence as a possible solution. Give the right AI sufficient examples, and it could figure out which control configurations produce the desired properties in the plasma. That would free people to focus on the desired end-state they wanted and then just letting the software produce it for them so that they could study it. An AI should also be more flexible; once it is trained on how to control the system, it should be able to produce very different plasma configurations for study without the need for reprogramming.
To move forward on this idea, all we needed were AI experts and a tokamak. For the new paper, the AI team came from Google’s DeepMind division, famed for developing software that could handle everything from protein folding to StarCraft. The tokamak comes courtesy of the Swiss Plasma Center at the EPFL in Lausanne.
Trained to fuse
Since setting the AI loose on actual hardware during the training process could be a disaster, the team started out with a tokamak simulator specific for the Swiss Plasma Center hardware. This was largely accurate, and they programmed limits into the AI that kept it from directing the plasma into a configuration where the simulator produced inaccurate results. DeepMind then trained a deep-reinforcement-learning program to reach a variety of plasma configurations by letting it control the simulator.
During training, an intervening layer of software provided a reward function that indicated how close the plasma’s properties were to the desired state. Another algorithm, termed a “critic,” learned the expected rewards for various changes to the tokamak’s control magnets. These were used by the actual control neural network to learn which actions it should take.
The critic was elaborate and computationally expensive, but it was only used during the training portion. When training was done, the control algorithm had learned which actions to take to reach a variety of states, and the critic could be discarded.
In order to allow real-time performance, the trained controller was bundled as an executable. The standard control software would be used to activate the tokamak and bring a plasma up to high energies. Once the plasma was stable, it handed off control to the AI.
It works!
The resulting software performed pretty much as you would want it to when set loose on actual hardware. The software could control experimental runs that targeted different conditions over time—in one test case, it ramped up the energy, held the plasma steady, then altered the plasma’s geometry, then relocated the plasma within the tokamak before ramping the energy back down. In another, it held two separate plasma structures in the same tokamak simultaneously.
Enlarge / Some of the different geometries produced by the DeepMind AI.
The paper describing this work has a large list of the things that the authors needed. That list includes a tokamak simulator that was both detailed enough to be accurate but compact enough to provide feedback quickly enough to make reinforcement learning possible. The training set had to include both common conditions similar to where control was handed to it and unusual conditions that let it learn how to transition those to experimental configurations. Additionally, the researchers needed to develop software that was detailed enough to evaluate a huge range of potential control options but also able to train a fast-performing controller that could be compiled into an executable.
The people behind this work are also excited about what it might presage for future work. Rather than simply limiting things to modeling existing hardware, they suggest that it should be possible to give an iteration of this software a desired plasma configuration, and let it identify the hardware geometry that will allow it to create that. Alternately, it could optimize the performance of existing hardware.
Now we just need to wait for a fusion reactor worthy of the AI’s attention.
Nature, 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04301-9 (About DOIs).
Bill Gates’s TerraPower to Build Idaho Experimental Nuclear Reactor
Though still in the early stages, it appears the U.S. appetite for experimental nuclear energy technology is on the rise. Last week, Bill Gates-founded TerraPower announced it had selected Kemmerer, Wyoming, as the site for its first “Natrium” 345 megawatt sodium-cooled fast reactor. Now, the company’s technology will be used to create a first-of-its-kind molten chloride reactor three hours away at the Idaho National Laboratory.
That reactor will be built in collaboration with gas utility giant Southern Company and utilize TerraPower’s molten chloride fast reactor technology. According to TerraPower, this type of reactor differs from others due to its ability to create carbon-free power and generate heat that could make this type of design attractive to heavy industries like steel that require high temperatures and lots of power. The lab itself is a hub for nuclear energy research.
Southern Company claims the reactor will represent the world’s first fast-spectrum, salt-fueled nuclear fission reactor to operate on a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. The company described as a “significant inflection point,” for the technology as a whole. Southern Company program manager Lauren Lathem told Bloomberg the company expects the reactor will feature less than 500 kilowatts of capacity, making it decidedly experimental.
The reactor is expected to enter service in 2026 but traces its origins back to 2015, when the two companies received $40 million from the Department of Energy as part of a grant to develop infrastructure to support molten chloride fast reactors. While most nuclear reactors have been focused on generating electricity for the public, this reactor could place a greater emphasis on providing green solutions for industry.
Solving that problem could be a key part of any attempt to meaningfully address climate change since industry as a sector accounts for nearly a quarter of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Steel alone is responsible for an estimated 9% of global emissions, and while there are no-carbon steel projects afoot, throwing one more iron into the proverbial fire doesn’t hurt.
TerraPower was co-founded in 2006 by Bill Gates with the aim of one day commercializing experimental new nuclear reactors. TerraPower had previously planned to build its first sodium-fueled reactor in Beijing, but that project fell victim to increased regulatory restrictions during the Trump presidency. Just last week the company announced that the project would operate out of Wyoming instead.
Nuclear energy is being taken seriously by the Biden administration, which has outlined efforts to invest in advanced reactors that it hopes will be smaller and safer than those currently in operation. If passed, the Build Back Better Act would also allocate around $3.2 billion for the Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program and $6 billion to preserve existing nuclear reactors that are nearing (or past) their retirement age.
Bill Gates’ TerraPower builds its first nuclear reactor in a coal town
Kemmerer, Wyoming, is a frontier coal town. It was organized in 1897 by coal miners and still employs people in the coal and natural gas industries today.
Photo courtesy TerraPower
TerraPower, a start-up co-founded by Bill Gates to revolutionize designs for nuclear reactors, has picked Kemmerer, Wyoming, as the preferred location for its first demonstration reactor. It aims to build the plant in the frontier-era coal town by 2028.
Constructing the plant will be a job bonanza for Kemmerer, with 2,000 workers at its peak, said TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque in a video call with reporters on Tuesday.
It will also provide new clean-energy jobs to a region dominated today by the coal and gas industry. Today, a local power plant, coal mine, and natural gas processing plant combined provide more than 400 jobs — a sizeable number for a region that has only around 3,000 people.
“New industry coming to any community is generally good news,” Kemmerer Mayor William Thek told CNBC. “You have to understand, most of our nearby towns are 50 miles or more from Kemmerer. Despite that, workers travel those distances every day for work in our area.”
The town of Kemmerer, Wyoming. The statue is of J.C. Penney, as Kemmerer is home of the first Penney store, William Thek, the mayor of Kemmerer told CNBC.
Photo courtesy William Thek
For TerraPower, picking a location was a matter of geological and technical factors, like seismic and soil conditions, and community support, said Levesque.
Once built, the plant will provide a baseload of 345 megawatts, with the potential to expand its capacity to 500 megawatts.
For reference, one gigawatt or 1,000 megawatts of energy will power a mid-sized city, and a small town can operate on about one megawatt, according to a rule of thumb Microsoft co-founder Gates provided in his recent book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.” The United States uses 1,000 gigawatts and the world needs 5,000 gigawatts, he wrote.
It will cost about $4 billion to build the plant, with half of that money coming from TerraPower and the other half from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program.
“It’s a very serious government grant. This was necessary, I should mention, because the U.S. government and the U.S. nuclear industry was, was falling behind,” said Levesque.
“China and Russia are continuing to build new plants with advanced technologies like ours, and they seek to export those plants to many other countries around the world,” Levesque said. “So the U.S. government was concerned that the U.S. hasn’t been moving forward in this way.”
Once built, it should provide power for 60 years, Levesque said.
How TerraPower’s reactors are different
The Kemerrer plant will be the first to use an advanced nuclear design called Natrium, developed by TerraPower with GE-Hitachi.
Natrium plants use liquid sodium as a cooling agent instead of water. Sodium has a higher boiling point and can absorb more heat than water, which means high pressure does not build up inside the reactor, reducing the risk of an explosion.
Also, Natrium plants do not require an outside energy source to operate their cooling systems, which can be a vulnerability in the case of an emergency shut-down. This contributed to the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, when a tsunami shut down the diesel generators running its back-up cooling system, contributing to a meltdown and release of radioactive material.
An artists rendering of a Natrium power plant from TerraPower.
Photo courtesy TerraPower
Natrium plants can store also heat in tanks of molten salt, conserving the energy for later use like a battery and, enabling the plant to bump its capacity up from 345 to 500 megawatts for five hours.
The plants are also smaller than conventional nuclear power plants, which should make them faster and cheaper to build than conventional power plants. TerraPower aims to get its plants to a cost of $1 billion, a quarter of the budget for the first one in Kemmerer.
“One important thing to realize is the first plant always costs more,” said Levesque.
Finally, Natrium plants produce less waste, a problematic and dangerous by-product of nuclear fission.
‘Times are changing’
The Kemmerer plant still faces a couple of hurdles, including federal permitting.
“There’s a comprehensive licensing process overseen by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, that, frankly, is expensive. There, there are many, many reviews,” Levesque said.
Also, the fuel that the Natrium plant uses is called high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, which is not yet available at commercial scale.
The existing nuclear fleet in the United States runs uranium-235 fuel that is enriched up to 5%, the Department of Energy says, while HALEU is is enriched between 5% and 20%.
“Sadly, we don’t have this enrichment capability in the U.S, today. And this is an area of great concern of the US government, and specifically the Department of Energy,” Levesque said.
But it’s coming, Levesque said. “I’m really certain that we’re going to establish that capability” in another public-private partnership, similar to the way the Natrium power plant demonstration is being built.
Once built, the plant will be turned over to Rocky Mountain Power, a division of Berkshire Hathaway Energy’s PacifiCorp, to operate.
There, it will become part of Rocky Mountain Power’s decarbonization plan.
Coal-fired plants like the Naughton facility in Kemmerer “have benefited our customers for decades with very low cost power,” Gary Hoogeveen, president and CEO of Rocky Mountain Power, said Tuesday. “And we appreciate that. But times are changing,” Hoogeveen said.
“External requirements from the federal government, state governments, regulatory agencies are going to require that we change and we’re going to need to decarbonize and as we go down that path, we see the Natrium project as being incredibly valuable to our customers.”
“Wyoming is a tremendous wind resource state,” Hoogeveen said. And so far, Rocky Mountain Power has built 2,000 megawatts of wind power capacity in Wyoming, and that’s going to grow. “We expect to build many more thousands of megawatts of wind capacity in the state.”
But the nuclear power plant in Kemmerer will be a key bridge for the state, Hoogeveen said.
“It is a great spot for absorbing the intermittency of of the renewable resources and using the storage that’s built in that is so incredibly valuable to us,” he said.
North Korean nuclear reactor used for plutonium production appears active, IAEA says
The International Atomic Energy Agency said that clues, such as the discharge of cooling water, observed in early July indicated the plant is active. No such evidence had been observed since December 2018, the IAEA said.
“The continuation of the DPRK’s nuclear program is a clear violation of relevant UN Security Council resolutions and is deeply regrettable,” the report added, referring to North Korea by its official acronym, The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).
The IAEA said there also were signs of activity at the nearby radiochemical laboratory, from mid-February until early July. The power plant is used to make nuclear fuel, and the radiochemical laboratory is used to reprocess the fuel rods from the plant into plutonium that can, theoretically, be used in the manufacturing of nuclear weapons.
Both the plant and the lab are located in North Korea’s best-known nuclear complex, Yongbyon.
The IAEA and other independent analysts have previously reported on the observed activity at the radiochemical laboratory and believed it may have been part of a campaign to turn nuclear fuel into plutonium for nuclear weapons.
IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi said in June that the duration of activity at the lab was consistent “with the time required for a reprocessing campaign.”
However, Grossi said it was not possible to confirm that reprocessing was taking place. IAEA inspectors were kicked out of North Korea in 2009, and the agency has been forced to monitor the country’s nuclear facilities remotely.
The South Korean Foreign Ministry said it is observing North Korea’s nuclear and missile activity continuously under close cooperation with the United States.
The fact that a reprocessing campaign has been underway likely indicates that North Korea had already produced nuclear fuel to be reprocessed. Whether that fuel was a few years old or produced recently, and covertly, remains unclear.
Jeffrey Lewis, a weapons expert and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said that though the IAEA’s report was expected, it is an important reminder of the challenges US President Joe Biden faces with respect to a nuclear-armed North Korea.
“At some level, none of this is new, but it is notable that the IAEA has said business at usual is going on at Yongbyon,” Lewis said. “One of the problems that we’ve had with North Korea is because it’s been business as usual for the past several years, people have kind of just gotten used to the idea (of a nuclear-armed North Korea) and kind of forget about it. This stuff has been happening, and we only check in now and again.”
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un purportedly offered to dismantle the Yongbyon complex in exchange for sanctions relief during negotiations with former US President Donald Trump in Hanoi in 2019. However, those talks collapsed in part because neither side was willing to budge. Trump’s team wanted either ballistic missile or other nuclear sites included in the deal, and Kim refused to accept a trade of Yongbyon for partial sanctions relief, Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, wrote in his memoir.
Relations between the two longtime adversaries have been frosty since, and both Washington and Pyongyang have been focused on containing the threat of Covid-19 since the pandemic swept the globe in early 2020. North Korea’s borders have been sealed to keep the virus at bay, despite the knock-on effects on trade with China, an economic lifeline for the impoverished country. Kim’s regime is now reportedly dealing with a food crisis.
President Biden’s administration has made several attempts to reach out to North Korea by email to start discussions with Washington, a senior South Korean official with direct knowledge of the situation told CNN.
North Korea has acknowledged receipt of the emails, the official said, but did not feel compelled to respond due to what is seen as a lack of a detailed agenda or any serious indication the US is willing to move the conversation forward from what was agreed upon at Trump and Kim’s first summit Singapore in June 2018.
China nuclear reactor shut down for maintenance because of fuel rod damage
State-owned China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN) said in the statement that “a small amount of fuel damage” had occurred during operation, but it’s still “within the limits allowed by the technical specifications.”
It added that “after thorough discussions between French and Chinese technicians, Taishan Nuclear Power Plant decided to shut down Unit 1 reactor for maintenance, and to examine the reasons of fuel damage and replace the damaged fuel.”
The statement further emphasized that the reactor is “safe and under control.”
CNN first reported in June that the French company Framatome — which supports operations at Taishan — had warned of an “imminent radiological threat” at the plant, prompting the United States government to investigate the possibility of a leak.
Framatome is a subsidiary of French power giant Electricite de France (EDF), which holds a 30% stake in the plant’s owner and operator, Taishan Nuclear Power Joint Venture Co., Ltd — a joint venture with CGN.
The Chinese government responded in June by saying that radiation levels around the plant were normal, adding “less than 0.01 percent” of more than 60,000 fuel rods in Unit 1 reactor were damaged. It said the damage was “inevitable” due to factors including fuel manufacturing and transportation.
In July, an EDF spokesperson said the situation was “serious,” but not an emergency.
The spokesperson said if the reactor was in France, the company would have shut it down already due to “the procedures and practices in terms of operating nuclear power plants in France.”
The spokesperson did not directly call on China to halt operations at the plant, noting it was a decision for CGN.