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SuperCritical Materials licenses technology for uranium seawater extraction
Last week, Austin, Texas–based nuclear fuel start-up SuperCritical Materials announced that it has secured a license from the Department of Energy for a patented uranium and critical materials adsorbent manufacturing process originally developed by a team led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
SuperCritical aims to use this license to extract uranium from seawater at an industrial scale in the United States and abroad.
Taejin Kim, Donghan Yoo, Jongin Yang, Seoryong Koo, KyungTae Lim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 8 | August 2024 | Pages 1304-1318
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2295147
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As small modular reactors are gaining attention as the future of nuclear energy, it has become increasingly imperative to minimize the number of required operators in order to improve economic competitiveness. Although the tasks of operators have changed and their workloads have been relatively reduced as digital technologies have been applied to advanced main control rooms (MCRs), no change in the number of operators has been made when compared to conventional MCRs in the Republic of Korea. As a solution, the introduction of natural language processing (NLP) technology to replace certain operator tasks in advanced MCRs can be a valuable means of reducing MCR staff. In this paper, we suggest a novel communication framework utilizing NLP technology to minimize the number of operators in advanced MCRs. To do this, we analyze operator tasks in advanced MCRs and select those that can be replaced by NLP technology. We then develop a prototype NLP-based system and analyze the process and characteristics of the suggested communication framework.