Media outlets have been abuzz this week with news of cesium-137 contamination in Great Value (Walmart’s private-label brand) frozen shrimp, according to a Food and Drug Administration report.

Researchers announced earlier this month that they have completed major construction of the Gamma-Ray Energy Tracking Array (GRETA), a precision tool for gamma ray spectroscopy that, according to Paul Fallon, a researcher at University of California–Berkeley and GRETA’s project director, will be 10 to 100 times more sensitive than previous nuclear science experiments. Fallon was quoted in an August 8 article published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)—where GRETA’s project leaders are based and GRETA was assembled.

GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s BWRX-300 small modular reactor and the British Rolls-Royce SMR have been downselected by Sweden’s state-owned Vattenfall as it evaluates the construction of new reactors for its Ringhals nuclear power plant site in Sweden.

Since Texas Tech University and Fermi America made a big splash unveiling their plans for the Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus in June, news has been quiet.

At the time, the company promised to make the 5,769-acre site in Amarillo, Texas, “the largest nuclear power complex in America.” Now, with the recent signing of a memorandum of understanding and the hiring of two nuclear professionals, Fermi America’s cofounders—former Texas governor and energy secretary Rick Perry and his son, Griffin Perry—are one small step closer to achieving their ambitious goals.

Department of Energy contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions and Florida International University’s Applied Research Center have agreed to expand workforce opportunities for students at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

It was near-certain that more good news was on the horizon for some of the 10 companies recently selected for the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program. Now, only one week later, one of those companies—Aalo Atomics—has become the first to make a major headline with its announcement that it has secured $100 million in Series B funding.

The Environmental Protection Agency has approved the addition of two new waste emplacement panels at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the Department of Energy’s geologic repository for defense-related transuranic waste in New Mexico.

Despite being home to just one nuclear power plant, the 1,756-MWe Calvert Cliffs, Maryland is among the top producers of nuclear power in the country relative to its total generated power.

This is an energy strategy that Maryland Gov. Wes Moore recently said he plans to expand on, in part through his recent signing of the state’s Next Generation Energy Act, H.B. 1035.

TerraPower announced yesterday that it has begun construction on the Kemmerer Training Center (KTC) at the site of the Natrium project in Kemmerer, Wyo. According to the company, the state-of-the-art KTC is the second facility to reach the construction milestone of the advanced nuclear project.

In a flurry of press releases, blog articles, and LinkedIn posts all released August 18, Kairos Power, Google, and the Tennessee Valley Authority announced a new power purchase agreement (PPA) between Kairos and TVA to supply up to 50 MW to the TVA grid, which powers two data centers owned by Google.

This agreement marks a significant milestone: It’s the first time a U.S. utility has entered into a PPA to buy power from a Gen IV reactor.

Graphite is a key component of traditional nuclear reactors—many of which are aging. Because graphite tends to swell and fail after lengthy exposure to radiation, it is essential to maintain its structural integrity over the lifetime of a plant.

Recently, a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and other institutions reported a new and better way to evaluate the quality of the graphite. This new procedure could allow nuclear power plant operators to predict structural failure before it happens in a more accurate and less destructive way than is currently available.

Holtec International has submitted a license termination plan (LTP) for Oyster Creek nuclear power plant to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a milestone in the decommissioning of the boiling water reactor, which operated from 1969 to 2018. Holtec took over Oyster Creek’s license from Exelon Generation in 2019 for the immediate decommissioning of the plant, located in Forked River, N.J.

As work progresses on the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program, which will progress through DOE authorization rather than Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing, three members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce have sent a critical letter to Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

The letter demands “information about the DOE and its employees’ dealings with the NRC and its staff” and expresses concern that DOE staff has “broken the firewall” between the departments.

A cohort of women working in the nuclear community visited Canada recently as part of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Lise Meitner Program (LMP) to boost their career development. During the third and final leg of the 2025 LMP, the women took part in two weeks of training focused on research reactors.

A new study, “Building Confidence in Models for Complex Barrier Systems for Radionuclides,” highlights a breakthrough in the modeling and simulation of underground nuclear waste interactions. Led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ph.D. student Dauren Sarsenbayev, assistant professor and ANS member Haruko Wainwright, and scientists Christophe Tournassat and Carl Steefel, the research shows how cutting-edge, high-performance computing simulations closely align with real-world experimental data from the Mont Terri underground laboratory in Switzerland. The alignment enhances confidence in the long-term safety of geological nuclear waste repositories.

About two years ago, on August 11, 2023, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker vetoed S.B. 76, a bill that would have lifted the state’s moratorium on new nuclear power plant construction. It was a reversal on his decidedly pronuclear stance; in 2021, he signed S.B. 2408, which supported Braidwood, Byron, and Dresden nuclear power plants with $694 million in state funding.

As most attendees of this year’s ANS Annual Conference left breakfast in the Grand Ballroom of the Chicago Downtown Marriott to sit in on presentations covering everything from career pathways in fusion to recently digitized archival nuclear films, 40 of them made their way to the hotel’s fifth floor to take part in the second offering of Nuclear 101, a newly designed certification course that seeks to give professionals who are in or adjacent to the industry an in-depth understanding of the essentials of nuclear energy and engineering from some of the field’s leading experts.

The article “Finding the shadows in a fusion system faster with AI,” published by the Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, details the public-private partnership among PPPL, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The partnership has led to a new artificial intelligence approach that is faster at finding what’s known as “magnetic shadows” in a fusion vessel: “safe havens protected from the intense heat of the plasma.”

The next opportunity to earn professional engineer (P.E.) licensure in nuclear engineering is this fall. Sign up now to enhance your studying with the help of the online module program from the American Nuclear Society.

The ninth International Mentoring Workshop in Japan was hosted recently by the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency in partnership with the Japan Atomic Energy Commission. Held at the Wakasa Bay Energy Research Centre (WERC) in Tsugura, Fukui Prefecture, the workshop brought together 26 Japanese female high school students to explore career options in STEM and nuclear energy fields.