China has formally launched its first indigenous nuclear power reactor design, with some French ancestry but born of two major internal contests, writes Ian Hore-Lacy.

Russian power engineering R&D institute NIKIET has completed the engineering design for the BREST-300 lead-cooled fast reactor.

The third stage of the generic design assessment (GDA) for the Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR) is to begin in September after regulators completed their initial high-level assessment of the Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy reactor design without identifying any fundamental issues to prevent it from being built in the UK.

South Korean designers have secured help from Argonne National Laboratory to develop an advanced reactor, which is partly based on America's successful EBR-II prototype. A 150 MWe sodium-cooled demonstration unit is slated for 2028.

Veteran Russian rock band Chaif yesterday toured Beloyarsk 4 - a 789 MWe fast-neutron reactor of the BN-800 design, which Rosenergoatom brought to first criticality in June.

Rostechnadzor, the Russian regulator, has granted the NIIAR research institute a license to site a multi-purpose fast neutron research reactor (MBIR) in Dimitrovgrad. The license is valid until 25 June 2019, the same year the reactor is to be commissioned.

Spanish utility Iberdrola will work with GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy to develop a proposal to build a Prism integral fast reactor in the UK, but is yet to decide the scope of its involvement either as an engineer or operator of the potential plant.

A team from Westinghouse and the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light-Water Reactors (CASL) has been recognised for its work on simulation of conditions in nuclear reactor cores using Titan, the USA's most powerful supercomputer.

The UK and China signed two agreements 17 June enabling Chinese companies not only to invest in nuclear power plant projects but also to build Chinese-design nuclear reactors in the UK, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) said.

A new floating nuclear power plant concept has been put forward by US university MIT based an offshore platform similar to those used by the oil industry.

Babcock & Wilcox will slash its spending on the mPower small modular reactor project, having failed to find customers or investors. William Fox has replaced Christofer Mowry as CEO of the Generation mPower subsidiary.

GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) has agreed to pay $2.7 million to resolve a lawsuit over alleged false claims related to a component for its ESBWR reactor design. The company expressly denies the allegations.