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ARPA-E to award $27M for advanced nuclear reactor systems operational technology: GEMINA

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The GE Research team aims to reduce operations and maintenance (O&M) costs by moving from a time- to condition-based predictive maintenance framework, using GE Hitachi’s BWRX-300 boiling water reactor as the reference design. Digital twins of MSRs will require this critical data, which is currently unavailable.

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Rio Tinto and Alcoa announce world’s first carbon-free aluminum smelting process; Apple assist; Elysis JV to commercialize

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The conventional Hall–Héroult process (invented in 1886) for smelting aluminum involves dissolving alumina (Al 2 O 3 ) in molten cryolite, and electrolyzing the molten salt bath, typically in a purpose-built cell with carbon electrodes. That represents an amount roughly equal to taking nearly 1.8

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ARPA-E awards $38M to 12 projects leading used nuclear fuel recycling initiative

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While used nuclear fuel, sometimes referred to as spent nuclear fuel, is created during the process of generating nuclear energy, clean energy generated from this fuel would be enough to power more than 70 million homes. Nuclear energy generates nearly a fifth of US electricity and accounts for half of all domestic clean energy generation.

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MIT team calls initial performance results of magnesium-antimony liquid metal battery “promising”

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The team assembled Mg||Sb single cell batteries and electrochemically characterized them by cyclic voltammetry (CV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) using a two-electrode electrochemical setup with the negative electrode (Mg) as the counter electrode/reference electrode and the positive electrode (Sb) as the working electrode.

MIT 301
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ARPA-E to award $30M to increase performance of solid ion conductors for batteries, fuel cells

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There are many classes of ion conductors, including aqueous and nonaqueous salt solutions; solid ceramics; polymers and polymer gels; molten salts; and others. Electro)chemical stability—both electrochemical stability and chemical stability, the former generally referring to stability as a function of an applied potential.

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