….Temporary storage for spent nuclear fuel rods at South Korea’s nuclear plants was 71 percent full in June, with one site in Ulsan — the heartland of South Korea’s nuclear industry — set to hit full capacity in 2016…..
….“Even under the most optimistic scenario, pyroprocessing and the associated fast reactors will not be available options for dealing with South Korea’s spent fuel on a large scale for several decades,” said Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, Miles Pomper and Stephanie Lieggi in a joint report for the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monetary Institute of International Studies. “With or without pyroprocessing, South Korea will need additional storage capacity.”….
Mar 27, 2013
The Japan Times
ULSAN, SOUTH KOREA – North Korea’s weapons program is not the only nuclear headache for South Korea. The country’s radioactive waste storage is filling up as its nuclear power industry burgeons, but what South Korea sees as its best solution — reprocessing the spent fuel so it can be used again — faces stiff opposition from its U.S. ally.
South Korea fired up its first reactor in 1978 and since then the resource-poor nation’s reliance on atomic energy has steadily grown. It is now the world’s fifth-largest nuclear energy producer, operating 23 reactors. But unlike the rapid growth of its nuclear industry, its nuclear waste management plan has been moving at a snail’s pace.
A commission will be launched before this summer to start public discussion on the permanent storage of spent nuclear fuel rods, which must be locked away for tens of thousands of years. Temporary storage for used rods in spent fuel pools at nuclear power plants is more than 70 percent full.
Undeterred by the Fukushima nuclear disaster or recent local safety failings, South Korea plans to boost atomic power to 40 percent of its energy needs with the addition of 11 reactors by 2024.
South Korea also has big ambitions to export its nuclear know how, originally transferred from the U.S. under a 1973 treaty that governs how its East Asian ally uses nuclear technology and explicitly bars reprocessing. The treaty also prohibits enrichment of uranium, a process that uranium must undergo to become a viable nuclear fuel, so South Korea has to get countries such as the U.S. and France to do enrichment for it.
That treaty is at the heart of Seoul’s current dilemma. It wants reprocessing rights to reduce radioactive waste and the right to enrich uranium, which would reduce a hefty import bill and aid its reactor export business. The catch: The technologies that South Korea covets can also be used to develop nuclear weapons.
Accommodating Seoul’s agenda would run counter to the Obama administration’s efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and also potentially undermine its arguments against North Korea’s attempts to develop warheads and Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program. South Korea, with its history of dabbling in nuclear weapons development in the 1970s and in reprocessing in the early 1980s, might itself face renewed international suspicion.
“For the United States, this is a nonproliferation issue. For South Korea, this is the issue of high-level radioactive waste management and energy security,” said Song Myung Jae, chief executive officer of state-run Korea Radioactive Waste Management Corp. “For a small country like South Korea, reducing the quantity of waste even just a little is very important.”
Newly elected President Park Geun Hye made revision of the 38-year-old treaty one of her top election pledges in campaigning last year. The treaty expires in March 2014 and a new iteration has to be submitted to Congress before the summer. The two sides have not narrowed their differences on reprocessing and enrichment by much despite ongoing talks.
South Korea also argues that uranium enrichment rights will make it a more competitive exporter of nuclear reactors as the buyers of its reactors have to import enriched uranium separately while rivals such as France and Japan can provide it. It is already big business after a South Korean consortium in 2009 won a $20 billion contract to supply reactors to the United Arab Emirates. Former President Lee Myung Bak set a target of exporting one nuclear reactor a year, which would make South Korea one of the world’s biggest reactor exporters.
Doing South Korea a favor would be a huge exception for the U.S. Congress, which has never given such consent to non-nuclear weapon states that do not already have reprocessing or enrichment technology.
“It is not the case that we think Korea will divert the material. It’s not a question of trust or mistrust,” Sharon Squassoni, director of the Proliferation Prevention Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said on the sidelines of the Asian Nuclear Forum in Seoul last month. “It’s a question of global policies.”
“Scotland has massive renewable resources and as European Energy Commissioner Gunther Oettinger said just a few weeks ago, can be a renewable energy powerhouse of Europe. Why on earth would anyone want to put all of that at risk by diverting money to pay for new nuclear white-elephants that are significantly more expensive than renewables?
Gunther Oettinger
Wednesday 27th March 2013 | 10:59
SNP press release
The announcement of public funding for nuclear energy projects has shattered Westminster’s no nuclear subsidy promise and demonstrated that the Westminster Government simply cannot be trusted to keep its word.
Lib Dem Business Secretary Vince Cable has announced £31 million in public funding for companies involved in the nuclear energy industry, making a mockery of the Westminster Government’s coalition agreement promise that there would be ‘no public subsidy’ for new nuclear energy.
The coalition agreement also states that ‘Liberal Democrats have long opposed any new nuclear construction’, raising questions as to why Vince Cable has allocated funds in this way.
Commenting, SNP Energy Spokesperson Mike Weir MP said:
“This funding announcement clearly breaks the Westminster Government’s promise and completely undermines the credibility of Vince Cable and the Lib Dems.
“With a recent opinion poll showing that a majority of people in Scotland are opposed to new nuclear energy, there is no justification for Westminster to be wasting public money in this way.
“Nuclear energy simply cannot be delivered without eye-wateringly high levels of subsidy. In these difficult economic times, the last thing people need is to see their money wasted on nuclear white elephants that are significantly more expensive than renewable options.
“Scotland has massive renewable resources and as European Energy Commissioner Gunther Oettinger said just a few weeks ago, can be a renewable energy powerhouse of Europe. Why on earth would anyone want to put all of that at risk by diverting money to pay for new nuclear white-elephants that are significantly more expensive than renewables?
“With the Westminster Government breaking promise after promise, it is little wonder that people in Scotland want major decisions to be made by a Scottish Government directly accountable to people living here.
“Only a Yes vote will ensure that the decisions that matter to Scotland are made by a Scottish Parliament directly elected by people living in Scotland.”
“…Why on earth would anyone want to put all of that at risk by diverting money to pay for new nuclear white-elephants that are significantly more expensive than renewables?…”
….’We in Britain should be leading the nuclear power industry, because we have such a glorious past,’ notes Judge. ‘When I was young, the smartest graduates would want to become nuclear engineers or physicists. Now, the dream is to do an engineering undergrad, then an MBA, then to get shipped off to a bank to become an energy analyst.’….. Lady Barbara Judge 🙂
….The International Energy Agency has estimated that there will be £930bn of investment in new nuclear reactors in the next 20 years, and £230bn in decommissioning and waste storage…..
The business secretary, Vince Cable, added: “We need to sharpen [the UK’s] competitive advantages to become a top table nuclear nation.”
“In 2010, the Climate Change Committee identified the low-carbon technologies the UK should develop and deploy in order to become world leading. The list included offshore wind and marine energy. It did not include nuclear. With the cost of offshore wind predicted to be on par with or cheaper than nuclear by 2020, there is no rationale for distorting policy to prop up the nuclear dinosaur.”
Nuclear-free future not an option for UK energy strategy, says chief adviser
Prof John Beddington affirmed importance of atomic power to UK at the launch of long-term nuclear strategy
Nuclear-free future not an option for UK energy strategy, says chief adviser
Prof John Beddington affirmed importance of atomic power to UK at the launch of long-term nuclear strategy
Chief scientific adviser to the UK government, John Beddington, said nuclear power is an important part of the UK’s energy future. May 2009. Photograph: David Wimsett/UPPA/Photoshot
The government said its nuclear strategy would help seize the economic opportunities of a £1 trillion global market and provide 40,000 UK jobs.
Prof Sir John Beddington, the government’s chief scientific adviser, said new nuclear power was essential: “We really can’t see a future for the UK energy sector, if we are to meet our climate change obligations and have resilience in the power sector, without a significant component of nuclear. A non-nuclear scenario is not one the government is thinking seriously about.”
Beddington led a review of the nuclear research and development programme needed if the government’s high-nuclear scenario for future energy is to be feasible. Prof David Mackay, chief scientific adviser at the department of energy and climate change, said this scenario – one of four set out in the 2011 carbon plan – envisaged 75GW of nuclear capacity in 2050 providing 86% of the UK’s electricity, a situation he compared to France today.
The industrial strategy, welcomed by the nuclear industry which worked with government to develop it, covers every part of the nuclear chain from new build, operations and maintenance and waste management. It includes:
…….HIROSHIMA – In a first, the Hiroshima High Court ruled Monday that the results of last December’s general election in Hiroshima’s No. 1 and 2 districts were invalid because of significant disparities in the weight of their votes.
The ruling makes it the first court in the nation to declare an election result void as lawsuits continue to flood the system over vote-value disparities……
Tokyo court rules Dec. 16 election unconstitutional but not invalid
March 06, 2013
By RYUJIRO KOMATSU/ Staff Writer
The Tokyo High Court on March 6 ruled that the December Lower House election was unconstitutional, but stopped short of invalidating the results, the first verdict handed down in a series of lawsuits over the election.
Lawyers around Japan filed lawsuits asking that the election be invalidated because it was conducted without reapportioning districts to overcome the imbalance in the value of a vote due to population discrepancies. The Supreme Court had previously ruled that this imbalance was “in a state of unconstitutionality.”
Verdicts in the other lawsuits are expected by March 27. The Supreme Court is then expected to hand down a uniform ruling by the end of the year.
In March 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that the August 2009 Lower House election was in a state of unconstitutionality because the largest difference in the value of a single vote between the most and least populous districts was 2.3 times. In its ruling, the Supreme Court called for the elimination of the process of first giving all prefectures one seat before distributing the remaining seats by population. That process was viewed as being the main cause for the large difference in the value of a vote.
However, the Diet in November passed a bill that only cut seats from the five least populous prefectures. The bill passed on the day the Lower House was dissolved.
The Dec. 16 Lower House election was conducted using the same electoral district boundaries used in the 2009 election that was ruled in a state of unconstitutionality by the Supreme Court. For that reason, the difference in the value of a vote between the most and least populous districts had increased to 2.43 times.
The Tokyo Election Administration Commission, the defendant in the case, argued that the call to invalidate the recent election should be rejected because time was needed to reapportion districts, and the 21 months between the Supreme Court ruling and the December Lower House election was insufficient to make that change.
Under the Public Offices Election Law, lawsuits seeking to invalidate election results are first submitted to high courts rather than district courts as is the usual case with lawsuits. While there is also a provision in that law that calls for efforts to be made to issue rulings within 100 days of the lawsuit being filed, that has previously not been followed to the letter. However, that has apparently changed, as the Tokyo High Court ruling came 79 days after the lawsuit was filed.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1976 and 1985 that Lower House elections were unconstitutional because of the large gap in the value of a vote. However, the court stopped short of invalidating the results of those elections.
The lawsuits related to the 2009 Lower House election led to four rulings at high courts that said it was unconstitutional, three that said it was held “in a state of unconstitutionality,” on the ground that there had not been enough time before the election to correct the vote imbalance, and two rulings that said it was constitutional.
By RYUJIRO KOMATSU/ Staff Writer
Japan- Allegations of General Election Fraud on Dec. 16, 2012 come to light!
Published: March 25th, 2013 at 8:31 pm ET By ENENews
itle: Powerpoint Presentation: Ken Buesseler Source: The Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident, Day 1 Author: The Helen Caldicott Foundation Date Presented: March 11, 2013
I found a website that holds historical data on the SSTA (see surface temperature anomaly’s) which indicates that region seems to activate from time to time (maybe water releases?) although it get weekly updates which makes the results less accurate… the current spot seems to begin at around the week of 30 January
It’s a pesky little website so change the date manually to go back in time
Diagram of Contaminated front of water to March 2012
“So how far and how fast [is the cesium traveling]? If you take a broader look at the Pacific Ocean and you look for a front of where you see the edge of the cesium moving. This goes to March 2012, about 180 degrees. This is actually based on samples, not models.”
….We will point out that the UK is in no position to object to nuclear proliferation while it insists on retaining its own nuclear ‘capacity’, in breach of its treaty obligations, and propose that instead we should join the non-nuclear majority in working for a nuclear-free world…..
Thursday, March 21, 2013
The Bath Chronicle
Like others I expect, I’ve already been thinking ahead to Easter – in particular how to use that lovely extra free day on the Monday.
But the thinking didn’t take long, because this year there’s is a must for the calendar: a demonstration at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) at Aldermaston, near Reading.
That’s where Britain’s nuclear bombs are made, currently for the Trident system, in which the warheads and their missiles are placed on Trident submarines.
It’s also where the research and development are being done for the proposed successor system to Trident.
….The Chart I accessed shows some movement from after midnight on the morning of the 22 March 2013 and he chart is finally switched off at 12 noon on the 22 March 2013
(It Is normal for most European countries to ignore radon peaks and some actually scrub them of the charts others like CRIIRAD show them but make a note to say it is “Normal radon” its not easy to tell the difference) In this case the plume cleared the UK but hit Ireland to some degree or other on the 21st March 2013.
Here are the Irish charts I managed to access showing varying degrees of light contamination hitting Ireland from early on the 21st that proves that Sellafield was outputting large quantities of radioactive gases for some time….
Figure 3.8 The map shows how caesium is carried from Sellafield by ocean currents. The route followed is the same as that followed by technetium. The map also shows how long it takes the caesium to reach the different areas once it has been discharged from the Sellafield facility.
Source Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat – Quick View
by LL Vintró –
wastes from Sellafield arise both in water used to purge the cooling ponds in ….. Contour map of the 99Tc distribution in the Irish Sea, together with sea water …
25 March 2013
A fresh legal bid to close down Sellafield’s nuclear reprocessing plant is one of the most significant cases the Irish Republic has ever taken.
Environment minister Martin Cullen said today’s action at a United Nations court was essential to protect Ireland’s interests.
Ministers are taking the UK to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea amid concerns that radioactive discharge from the Cumbrian site is polluting the Irish Sea. Mr Cullen said he regretted that such a step was necessary.
He said: “These cases are among the most significant legal actions ever taken by Ireland.
“They represent the Irish government’s absolute commitment to ensuring that Ireland’s rights under these international conventions in relation to Sellafield and its operations are fully vindicated. I know the team, led by the Attorney General, will make the strongest possible arguments in support of our concerns.”
He said there were several worrying issues, including claims of pollution from the discharge of radioactive waste from the MOX plant into the Irish Sea.
Mr Cullen also expressed concern at the “inadequacy” of the environmental assessment undertaken by the UK in relation to the facility and the failure to properly assess the risk of terrorist attack on the site. International movements of radioactive materials associated with the site were also a cause for concern.
Irish government chief whip Mary Hanafin said the fresh legal action was a sign of Ireland’s determination to use every means possible to close down the plant.
“My constituents along the coastline of Dublin Bay are living with the very real threat of Sellafield. They can be assured the hearing in The Hague represents the most significant case this country has ever taken against Sellafield to date.”
The hearings will take place before a five-member tribunal. They will proceed for around three weeks and will be open to the public with some exceptions where material being referred to is of a confidential nature.
Iain Lindsay claimed that there was “increasing evidence” that Iran was “providing support to people here who are bent on violence”.
….as Barack Obama said, ‘Yes we can.’”
Today, that euphoria is gone and Bahrain’s protest movement is in tatters. Many of its leaders and activists are imprisoned and its followers, most of them Shiite, subject to harsh repression under emergency laws. Where Tunisia and Egypt saw change, Bahrain saw more of the same…..
The British ambassador to Bahrain has accused Iran of providing support to those behind spreading violence and terrorist activities in the tiny Persian Gulf island nation.
The British ambassador in the Kingdom of Bahrain Iain Lindsay praised the steps, reformation initiatives…
The Bahrain Dictator loved this guy! read the Government link above!
Iain Lindsay claimed that there was “increasing evidence” that Iran was “providing support to people here who are bent on violence”.
He made the allegation shortly before a British parliamentary delegation is due to arrive in Manama as part of an inquiry into the UK’s relationship with Bahrain.
That flare right here is exactly where the containment should be, and that flare is at 128°C which means it’s not steam. Steam can’t exist over 100°C. […] At atmospheric pressure when you boil steam you’re only going to get to 100°C. That flare is at 128°C which means that it’s not steam.
It means it’s hot radioactive gases being released directly from the containment. It also means that inside the containment, it was not below the boiling of water, it was above the boiling point of water. There was no liquid water inside that containment.
This is on March 20, nine days after the accident. The containment is venting hot radioactive gases directly to the environment.
This is proof positive […] they’ve known for a long time that huge amounts of cesium were being released directly to the air because they weren’t being trapped in the water in the suppression pool.
Minister Kuba helped Czech companies in competition for contracts on the Indian market valued at hundreds of millions dollars MINISTER OF INDUSTRY AND TRADE MARTIN KUBA EVALUATED WORKING VISIT TO INDIA, WHICH WAS CONDUCTED LAST WEEK, AS VERY SUCCESSFUL. MINISTER WAS COMFORTED ESPECIALLY BY THE INDIAN COMPANIES INTERESTED IN COOPERATION WITH THEIR CZECH COUNTERPARTS AND…
ČEZ Temelín Bid Ranking Reaffirms Westinghouse AP1000® Nuclear Power Plant Credentials; Westinghouse Temelín Bid Achieves Highest Ranking
PRWeb
Published 7:15 pm, Monday, March 25, 2013
Westinghouse today welcomed the top preliminary ranking by ČEZ a.s. of its bid for the expansion of Temelín Nuclear Power Plant in the Czech Republic, reaffirming the quality and depth of the Westinghouse bid to develop and deliver a turnkey dual-unit AP1000 nuclear power plant at Temelín.
PRAGUE (PRWEB) March 25, 2013
Westinghouse Electric Company today welcomed the preliminary ranking by ČEZ a.s. of its bid for the expansion of Temelín Nuclear Power Plant in the Czech Republic. The top ranking by ČEZ reaffirms the quality and depth of the Westinghouse bid to develop and deliver a turnkey dual-unit AP1000 plant at Temelín.
Westinghouse and its partners will continue to work closely with ČEZ during the next phase of the negotiations to provide a superior and competitive project that will meet Czech and European Union licensing requirements combined with the strength of our local construction and project team to deliver safely, on time and on budget.
Japan is the number one country in the world where nearly 90% of the citizens believe in anthropogenic global warming. 54 nuclear reactors in Japan have been justified as carbon-free “clean” energy to help fight the global warming.
The truth is that nuclear energy has been pushed by the electric power companies because it fattens their bottom lines thanks to the accounting allowed by the national government. No matter how much the nuclear power generation costs, the power companies are allowed to fully transfer that cost to the consumers (mostly retail, household customers) and add a fixed percentage of that cost as their profit. In other words, bigger the cost, bigger the profit.
But nuclear energy was actually not needed to meet the demand in the beginning of this century, as the economy was still in doldrums after the massive real estate bubble burst and people had other sources for heating and cooking (natural gas, heating oil). So what did the power companies and the national government come up with?
A coordinated push to increase electricity consumption by launching a campaign of “all-electric lifestyle”. It suddenly became “cool and sophisticated” to heat the house using electricity, cook with electricity. Electricity consumption skyrocketed in large cities like Tokyo, justifying more nuclear reactors to meet the newly created “demand” in a country with declining population and the economy that was going nowhere.
At the same time, TEPCO, for one, was busy educating the impressionable mothers, selling them the story of global warming and how they could help save the planet by going clean electric.
The company didn’t do it themselves, of course. It used a subcontractor.
‘Housewives’ educating children on energy linked to TEPCO PR firm
A puppet theater troupe advertising itself on its website as “started by a group of housewives concerned about energy” was in fact founded by staff from Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO)’s PR firm, the Mainichi has learned.
According to the website of the puppet theater troupe in question — Kappa no Kawataro Ichiza — in 2000 a group of housewives set up an online “energy club” to exchange their views on energy after taking their “children to visit a nuclear power plant and discovering the great efforts being taken to supply energy to private households.”
The puppet troupe was launched after club members decided they “wanted to pass on the importance of energy to (their) children,” the website continues. In 2002, the troupe was certified as the Japan Industrial Location Center (JILC)’s “energy theater caravan nonprofit organization project.”
According to a leading member of the group, however, all five members of the troupe belong to a research firm doing publicity work for TEPCO. Their PR work involves holding parties at their homes for fellow housewives and informing participants of the necessity of nuclear power. One troupe member threw approximately 300 such parties at her home.
Upon hearing from participants at the parties that they wanted their children to learn the same information, the group responded to a JILC call for theater troupes to educate young children about energy. Group members said they made a presentation at the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy — which commissioned the JILC competition — before the public competition, and were promised assistance on the spot. The members did not explain, however, whether they went to the agency on their own initiative or were encouraged by another party to do so.
One puppet show plot entails “kappa,” a creature from Japanese folklore, receiving a letter from a polar bear asking for help. The kappa set out to find that melting ice has separated a baby polar bear from its mother. While the mother and cub are reunited, the kappa are dumbfounded to hear about global warming. Another of the group’s shows features a trip to the Edo period (1603-1868) in a time machine to get a glimpse of life without electricity and an understanding of how convenient life has become because of it.
Through 2005, the troupe received up to 2.5 million yen a year in assistance as part of the agency and JILC program, performing at schools in areas hosting nuclear power stations, and at events in the Tokyo metropolitan area. Each member received 7,000 yen per performance. After financial assistance subsequently plummeted to 600,000 yen per year, however, the group chose to cut off its affiliation with the project. Since the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, the troupe has performed for children at the request of the Atomuseum in Niigata Prefecture.
The members admit to some feelings of discomfort with their dealings with TEPCO PR officials.
“TEPCO employees sometimes come to our parties for training, but they say they want us to keep their presence a secret form the people we’ve invited,” one member said. “There are things (TEPCO) won’t tell even us.”
Now they say they are uncomfortable, after being busted by Mainichi. They also quickly took down their website (here’s a cache). They took down the youtube videos on their channel, but here’s one copied by a user – “Kappa meets dinosaur”：
….Some 126,000 barrels of nuclear waste have been dumped in the Asse II salt mine over the last 50 years. German politicians are pushing for a law promising their removal. But the safety, technical and financial hurdles are enormous, and experts warn that removal is more dangerous than leaving them put….. Der Speigel February 21, 2013
Date 25.03.2013
Author Jennifer Fraczek / d
Editor Simon Bone
Where is there a suitable permanent storage site for nuclear waste? The question has been up in the air for decades, but Germany hopes a commission can determine the criteria in the search for a final facility.
Chancellor Angela Merkel government’s U-turn on nuclear power was quite amazing: following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in March 2012, the center-right coalition decided to close all nuclear power plants in Germany over the next decade – that is, a phase-out by 2022.
What will happen to the spent radioactive fuel rods, however, remains to be seen. The issue has been a matter of debate in Germany for many years. For a long time, politicians favored final storage deep in the salt dome near the town of Gorleben in Lower Saxony. In the late 1970s, West Germany began to look into the site, then a remote location, to see if it was suitable as a safe permanent storage facility. Alternatives were not considered at the time.
The survey proved to be time-consuming, so an interim storage site was arranged nearby in the early 1980s. Accompanied by often violent protests, spent fuel rods are regularly transported from the French nuclear reprocessing plant in La Hague to the – still – interim site.
Controversial choice
Over the years, the wisdom of continuing to explore the salt dome was increasingly questioned. Opponents of creating a final storage site for radioactive waste at Gorleben warned of the danger of leaking radioactivity and water penetration due to porous rock.
“I’m fully confident that we will be able to continue this, and ultimately have plutonium produced in this country again in kilogram quantities, on an annual basis,” he added.
The goal is to eventually produce between 3.3 pounds and 4.4 pounds (1.5 to 2 kg) of plutonium-238 per year, which should be enough to support NASA’s robotic planetary science missions, Dudzinsky said.
Behold the boldest medical steampunk from yesterday’s bright future. Courtesy of the National Heart Institute and the Atomic Energy Agency, and in a story relayed by Shelley McKellar in journal Technology and Culture, two parallel projects between 1967 and 1977 were attempting to design a nuclear powered artificial heart.
Using essentially the same radioisotope thermoelectric generator engine technology that powers NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover, a mechanical heart may be made to power the human body for many years without swapping out the batteries. But plutonium-238, sadly, has other uses such as terrorism, making the thought of such devices a pipe dream for today’s future.
New research could help create nuclear batteries that have controllable energy release like conventional batteries but with many times the storage capacity.
Scientists at Surrey University have identified a material that may have the necessary properties to trap energy in its atoms and then release it when required, unlike existing nuclear batteries that release energy at a constant rate.
Nuclear batteries typically harness energy from naturally decaying atoms. This stored energy is much greater than that in electrochemical batteries and is used for applications that require long, continuous energy supplies, such as medical implants or spacecraft.
The Surrey researchers, led by Prof Phil Walker, have gathered evidence about the 212 isotope ofl bismuth that suggests it has the necessary atomic structure to allow energy to be released on demand without needing large amounts of additional energy to start the process.
‘The idea is to find an example where there’s just a small energy barrier to release that stored energy,’ Walker told The Engineer.
‘It’s like having a reservoir half way up a hill. You pump the water up the hill and it gets stored there. It doesn’t take much to push the water over the lip of the reservoir.’
The team trapped energy in the nuclei of bismuth-212 ions using a particle accelerator to put them into an excited state, and then observed them by capturing the particles in a storage ring.
nuclear-news 
