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"Nuclear power generation technologies are now cost competitive with fossil fuels and innovation is gathering pace across the sector," British consultancy Lloyd's Register says in a report published today. The report, titled Technology Radar - a Nuclear Perspective, is based on the "insights and opinions of leaders across the sector", as well as the views of almost 600 professionals and expertsÌýfrom utilities, distributors, operators and equipment manufacturers.

Australian and Chinese researchers have made progress in understanding the mechanical properties of a new class of materials for use in molten salt reactors. The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation said yesterday that NiMo-SiC alloys - prepared from nickel molybdenum metal powders with added silicon carbide particles - have superior corrosion resistance and radiation damage resistance.

Experimental and theoretical research has shown 'spherical' tokamaks to be a "fast route to fusion" compared with more "conventional" tokamak devices such as Joint European Torus, according to David Kingham, chief executive of Tokamak Energy.

The UK government has highlighted the role of nuclear power among its responses to a report by the Energy and Climate Change Committee. The parliamentary committee published its Third Report of Session 2016–17, The energy revolution and future challenges for UK energy and climate change policy, last October.

The US House of Representatives - the lower chamber of the United States CongressÌý-Ìýhas approved a handful of bipartisan bills from the last session of Congress that aim to bolster research on advanced nuclear reactors, allow for more challenges at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and change rules for federal efficiency standards. The Advanced Nuclear Technology Act of 2017 was passed by voice vote on 23 January.

Terrestrial EnergyÌýUSA announced today it had informed the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission of its plans to license a small modular reactor in the USA. Terrestrial said it intends to start "pre-application interactions" with the regulator this year and to make its licensing application in late 2019.

NuScale Power has asked the US Nuclear Regulatory CommissionÌýto approve the company's small modular reactor commercial power plant design. This is the first-ever SMR design certification application to be submitted to the NRC.

Physicists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and TechnologyÌýand the Joint Institute for High Temperatures of the Russian Academy of Sciences have described the mobility of line defects, or dislocations, in uranium dioxide. This, they announced this week, will enable future predictions of nuclear fuel behaviour under operating conditions.

The US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration has entered into follow-on cooperative agreements with three projects aimed at securing a domestic supply of molybdenum-99 without using highly enriched uranium. The latest funding completes the full $25 million NNSA contribution to each project.

Four Russian cities have expressed an interest in using small reactors to supply heat and power, according to Yuriy Kuznetsov of NA Dollezhal Research and Development Institute of Power Engineering (NIKIET). A Rosatom feasibility study has concluded that up to 38 cogeneration reactors could potentially be deployed at 14 sites for this purpose.

The University of Bristol, in England, has developed new technology that uses nuclear waste to generate electricity in a nuclear-powered battery. A team of physicists and chemists from the university has "grown a man-made diamond" that, when placed in a radioactive field, is able to generate a small electrical current. The developers say the innovation could solve some of the problems of nuclear waste, clean electricity generation and battery life.

Russia has started testing its new type of nuclear fuel, REMIX, at the MIR research reactor at the Research Institute of Atomic Reactors in Dimitrovgrad, which is in the Ulyanovsk region. Development of REMIX (from Regenerated Mixture) fuel is part of state nuclear corporation Rosatom's strategy to enable better use of recycled uranium and plutonium on an industrial scale in pressurized water reactors.