A Quick Survey of What’s in the Works for AREVA’s Advanced Reactor Technologies

Today as part of an on-going dialogue with bloggers and other parties also very interested in nuclear, the AREVA North America Blog had a very informative chat with Finis Southworth, chief technology officer of AREVA’s U.S. reactor division.

Finis fielded questions on all of AREVA’s work on the development of nuclear reactors.

Below are links and informational brochures on some of the projects we discussed. Even if you were not part of the conversation, this is a great resource for the work being done at AREVA for the future of nuclear energy:

ATMEA, a joint venture by AREVA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, is developing a mid-sized Generation III+ pressurized water reactor (PWR) using innovative, reliable, proven technology.

Technical description of ATMEA1 (pdf)

AREVA is also developing KERENA, a mid-sized boiling water reactor (BWR) for customers that prefer BWR technology.

For high- and very high-temperature reactors, AREVA participates in research carried out in the context of the International Generation IV Forum, created in 2001. The mission of the forum is to select and develop future nuclear production systems for the target dates of 2030-2035, integrating sustainable development criteria (safety, competitiveness, optimization of resources, reduction of waste, resistance to external threats, etc.).

The International Generation IV Forum brings together nine countries: South Africa, Brazil, Canada, South Korea, the United States, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and the European Union (through the CEA – the French Atomic Energy Commission).

AREVA HTR Brochure (PDF)
AREVA HTR Brochure (PDF)

During this Thanksgiving weekend, we’d want to highlight that we’re thankful for our AREVA online communities building here and on a number of social networks. Today we’d highlight our Facebook fans. Thanks everyone!

If you are a Facebook user and have not yet joined this Page, please do think about joining!

If you aren’t familiar with the new feature of Twitter lists, see this good explanation of them here….

For our Twitter community we are expermienting with a few lists, including AREVA People on Twitter, and Nuclear Bloggers as our first lists.

You can see the beginning of those lists:

http://twitter.com/AREVAinc/areva-people
http://twitter.com/AREVAinc/nuclear-bloggers

Feel free to follow those lists and also if you’d like to be added to either list, just post a comment here, or DM us on Twitter….

As we’ve mentioned before, the American Nuclear Society’s Winter Meeting is going to be held right here in Washington, DC, just a stone’s throw away from AREVA North America’s offices in Bethesda, Maryland. We’re pleased to join Cool Hand Nuke in hosting an informal dialogue on Social Media and Nuclear Energy, talking with bloggers and industry representatives about how nuclear energy is represented in the blogosphere and what we can all do together to improve the conversation.

The meetup will be held this coming Tuesday night, November 17, from 6:30-8:30pm at the OMNI Shoreham Hotel on Calvert St NW. We’ll be providing some refreshments. We’re looking forward to meeting in person a lot of people we’ve only known through our blog interactions and on our monthly blogger conference calls. If you’re going to be at the ANS Winter Meetings, please be sure to stop by! All are welcome!

(Thanks to Dan Yurman of Idaho Samizdat for starting the ball rolling on this!)

Thanks again to our Facebook uses who have joined our official Facebook Page.

If you are a Facebook user, we’d welcome you becoming a Fan and joining the community there…

Dan Yurman of Idaho Samizdat is putting together an informal social event on Tuesday, November 17th for nuclear energy bloggers attending the winter meeting of the American Nuclear Society. This winter’s meeting is right in our backyard (AREVA’s North America headquarters is in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington DC). You can read all the details over at Idaho Samizdat. Thanks for putting this together, Dan!

We want from time to time to focus on some of our different social network outreach efforts… Today we’d thank our Facebook users who have become fans of our Facebook fan page…

If you are a Facebook user, please do consider becoming a fan… we’re planning to expand and build out our presence there in big ways. We really appreciate the growing community of AREVA alums, stakeholders and friends that we’re growing there.

We’d like to give a warm welcome to some newcomers to the neighborhood!  Adding to a blogosphere already diverse in background and discussion, they bring opinions on the subject that shake up the conversation on nuclear energy.

It’s really great to see the dialogue on nuclear energy growing.  There’s a lot to discuss, and there will be a lot more to come.  So keep writing and we’ll keep reading!  We’ve added these blogs to our “Blogs We Read” section in our sidebar. Check these folks out if you have a chance:
 
Nuclear Brunette - A nuclear engineering student at Georgia Tech University writing about nuclear energy
  
Clean Energy Insight – Young professionals from the North American Young Generation in Nuclear (NA-YGN) who came together to educate and raise awareness of nuclear energy

What is Nuclear? - A great new resource site, explaining some of the finer points of nuclear power in easy-to-understand terms.

The Energy Collective – Not really a new blog, but we don’t think we’ve highlighted them on here before.  It’s a great resource for discussion and debate over the big picture of our 21st-century energy future.

We hope you’ll stop by and give them a read!

As a complement to our blogging efforts, we want to highlight AREVA North America’s presence on several major social networks.

These sites include Linked-In, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube – and are part of the rapidly growing online communities of people sharing interests and information.

If you are a part of those social networks we’d very much appreciate it if you could follow us, become a fan, link up, or subscribe to our channel…

We’ve collected some of the highlights from last Friday’s first “Jacques Talk” conference call with AREVA North America President Jacques Besnainou. The conversation was wide-ranging and open, and we’re really glad Jacques had the opportunity to talk directly with the nuclear energy blogging community. If you’re a nuclear energy blogger and you’d like to be in on the next conference call, send us an email.

They’re all in MP3 format.

Jacques Besnainou on the NYT Article about Olkiluoto

Jacques Besnainou on Recycling

Jacques Besnainou on Canadian Loan Guarantees

Jacques Besnainou on Lessons Learned from Olkiluoto

Jacques Besnainou on International Enrichment Markets

If you’d like to listen to the whole call unedited, you can download it here.