The Department of Energy’s National Reactor Innovation Center (NRIC) awarded $3.9 million to three advanced nuclear energy developers on October 23 to design experiments to test microreactor designs in the Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments (DOME) test bed at Idaho National Laboratory.
INL to use Microsoft’s AI to streamline nuclear licensing
The Idaho National Laboratory has announced that it will collaborate with Microsoft on the use of artificial intelligence technologies to streamline the nuclear permitting and licensing...
For the past few years, I have been conducting a thoroughly unscientific, one-question poll of nuclear utility and supplier CEOs and senior executives: “What keeps you up at night?” The...
INL makes a case for eliminating ALARA and setting higher dose limits
A report just released by Idaho National Laboratory reviews decades of radiation protection standards and research on the health effects of low-dose radiation and recommends that the current...
BWXT starts building Pele microreactor core
Fabrication of the reactor core for the 1.5-MW Project Pele demonstration microreactor has begun, according to BWX Technologies. Pele is being developed at the BWXT Innovation Campus in...
ORNL, INL make deals on AI for nuclear licensing
The United States has tight new deadlines—18 months, max—for licensing commercial reactor designs. The Department of Energy is marshaling the nuclear expertise and high-performance...
Data centers planned at four DOE sites
At the end of his July 15 speech at the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, President Trump promised that “a lot more [was] going to be announced in the coming week” for...
Argonne’s Aurora sets the stage for AI and nuclear energy executive summit
Leaders from private companies, government, and national laboratories gathered at Argonne National Laboratory on July 17 and 18 for an exclusive AI x Nuclear Energy Executive Summit that the...
“Trailblazer” Hanford engineer Wanda Munn passes away
Nuclear engineer and longtime ANS member Wanda Munn died on July 23 at the age of 93. Described as a “trailblazer for women [and] an outspoken advocate for the peaceful use of nuclear...
Test reactor fuel fabrication will be fast-tracked by DOE under new pilot program
The Department of Energy has announced a program to accelerate nuclear fuel fabrication for new test reactors. The Fuel Line Pilot Program would see the DOE approve facilities developed by...
Savannah River Site could produce 3.1 MT of HALEU as downblending plan okayed
From 2003 to 2011, staff at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site downblended high-enriched uranium in the site’s H Canyon, producing over 300 metric tons (MT) of low-enriched...
