The NRC’s Annie Caputo resigns

July 30, 2025, 7:46AMNuclear News

Caputo

Commissioner Annie Caputo is resigning from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, according to a statement sent out to staff on Tuesday morning. Her resignation comes one day after the U.S. Senate voted to reconfirm chair David Wright to the commission.

“The time has come for me to more fully focus on my family,” Caputo said in her statement, provided by NRC spokesperson Scott Burnell. “I believe the [Trump] administration’s recent executive orders and the bipartisan ADVANCE Act have given the agency a platform for change.”

“Trailblazer” Hanford engineer Wanda Munn passes away

July 29, 2025, 12:00PMNuclear News

Munn

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 technology” in her Tri-City (Wash.) Herald obituary, Munn followed a unique path to her nuclear engineering career. She did not get her degree until she was 46, and she subsequently spent 18 years working on systems design, construction, and operation of the Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF) reactor for Westinghouse at the Hanford nuclear site in eastern Washington state.

Nontraditional student: Munn was born in 1931. She graduated high school early, at age 16, and started to pursue a medical degree. However, those plans changed when she married at age 18. By her early 40s, she was divorced and working as a secretary in a university nuclear engineering department when she decided to return to school to get a nuclear engineering degree.

ANS hosts webinar on a risk-informed framework for nuclear security risks

July 29, 2025, 9:30AMNuclear News

The American Nuclear Society’s Risk-informed, Performance-based Principles and Policy Committee (RP3C) has held another presentation in its monthly Community of Practice (CoP) series. Former RP3C chair N. Prasad Kadambi opened the June 27 meeting with brief introductory remarks about the RP3C and the need for new approaches to nuclear design that go beyond conventional and deterministic methods. He then welcomed this month’s speaker: Tim Sande, a senior manager responsible for probabilistic risk assessments (PRA) and risk-informed engineering at Enercon, who presented “A Risk-Informed Framework for Managing Nuclear Facility Security Risks.”

Watch the full webinar here.

3D printing to quicken construction and lower costs tested at Kairos Power campus

July 28, 2025, 12:04PMNuclear News
The 3D-printed forms—inside of which concrete is poured—are used to build radiation shielding columns for Kairos Power’s Hermes Low-Power Demonstration Reactor. (Screen capture from ORNL video)

The Department of Energy’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (MDF) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in partnership with Kairos Power and Barnard Construction, has successfully developed and validated large-scale, 3D-printed polymer composite forms for casting complex concrete structures.

The test took place at Kairos Power’s Oak Ridge, Tenn., campus, where the Hermes Low-Power Demonstration Reactor is currently under construction.

See a video of construction activity here.

Palisades gets a key green light from NRC

July 28, 2025, 9:32AMNuclear News
Acting director of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation Greg Bowman (seated, left) and Holtec president Kelly Trice (seated, right) and other NRC officials celebrate the Palisades license restoration at the NRC headquarters. (Photo: NRC)

The Palisades nuclear power plant has been formally transitioned from decommissioning status to holding an operating license following the completion of an extensive technical review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It’s a historic move; before this, no U.S. nuclear plant had ever made the transition from shut down to approved for restart.

ORNL, INL make deals on AI for nuclear licensing

July 25, 2025, 12:00PMNuclear News
ORNL leadership gathered at the Nuclear Opportunities Workshop in Knoxville, with Trey Lauderdale, CEO of Atomic Canyon. From left: Joe Hoagland, Director of Special Initiatives; Susan Hubbard, Deputy for Science and Technology; Stephen Streiffer, ORNL Director; Lauderdale; Gina Tourassi, Associate Laboratory Director for Computing and Computational Sciences; and Mickey Wade, Associate Laboratory Director for Fusion and Fission Energy and Science. (Photo: Carlos Jones/ORNL)

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 computing assets of its national laboratories, in partnership with private tech companies, to develop generative AI tools and large-scale simulations that could help get nuclear reactor designs through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing process—or the DOE’s own reactor pilot program. “Accelerate” and “streamline” are the verbs of choice in recent announcements from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory, as they describe plans with Atomic Canyon, Microsoft, and Amazon.

NEA publishes new SMR Dashboard

July 25, 2025, 9:30AMNuclear News

The OECD Nuclear Energy Agency has published the third edition of the NEA Small Modular Reactor Dashboard, a comprehensive global review of SMR technology that defines criteria for assessing progress in the development of these advanced reactors. The assessments are based on six dimensions of readiness: licensing, siting, financing, supply chain, engagement, and fuel.

CNL investigates alloy with potential reactor applications

July 24, 2025, 3:00PMNuclear News

A research team led by Canadian Nuclear Laboratories is studying a type of high-entropy alloy (HEA) that seems to withstand a cascade-involved irradiation environment at elevated temperatures better than stainless steel exposed to similar conditions. In a paper published in the Journal of Nuclear Materials, the researchers describe an HEA made of chromium, iron, manganese, and nickel (CrFeMnNi) that has the potential to improve the safety and functionality of nuclear reactors, as well as of spacecraft.

Savannah River Site could produce 3.1 MT of HALEU as downblending plan okayed

July 24, 2025, 12:00PMNuclear News
H Canyon under construction in the early 1950s (left) and in 2010. (Photos: Savannah River Site)

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 uranium that was fabricated into fuel. The facility has since been idled, but downblending could soon begin again—this time to high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU).

BWXT advances on TRISO project

July 24, 2025, 7:01AMNuclear News
The chemical vapor infiltration furnace at BWXT’s Lynchburg Technology Center in Lynchburg, Va. (Photo: BWXT)

BWX Technologies (BWXT) has achieved a key milestone in its project to additively manufacture advanced forms of TRISO fuel for Generation IV advanced nuclear reactors. The Lynchburg Technology Center of subsidiary company BWXT Advanced Technologies, located in Lynchburg, Va., has successfully installed and tested a chemical vapor infiltration (CVI) furnace that solidifies pre-forms that are then filled with TRISO particles, a fuel consisting of carbon and silicon layers surrounding a uranium kernel.

Oklo announces plans to collaborate with Vertiv and Liberty

July 23, 2025, 3:03PMNuclear News
Vertiv and Oklo plan to collaborate on modular, energy-efficient power and cooling systems and designs developed to support data centers driven by nuclear power. (Image: Oklo)

In back-to-back press releases, Oklo recently announced two new partnerships that seek to advance the deployment of its commercial power reactors in the data center market.

These partnerships, one with Ohio-based Vertiv Holdings and one with Colorado-based Liberty Energy, continue Oklo’s trend in working to position their Aurora powerhouse as a key part of the energy solution for powering the AI boom.

Argonne’s Aurora sets the stage for AI and nuclear energy executive summit

July 23, 2025, 7:00AMNuclear News
Energy Secretary Chris Wright (center) and leaders from Argonne, Intel, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise cut the ribbon to celebrate the Aurora exascale supercomputer. (Photo: Argonne)

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 Department of Energy called a first-of-its-kind forum to “align next-generation nuclear systems with the needs of digital infrastructure.”

Bahrain signs a nuclear collaboration MOU with the U.S.

July 22, 2025, 9:30AMNuclear News

Less than a week after news broke of the U.S. entering into civil nuclear talks with Malaysia, the U.S. State Department announced that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Bahrain’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani have also signed a memorandum of understanding concerning civil nuclear cooperation.

Test reactor fuel fabrication will be fast-tracked by DOE under new pilot program

July 21, 2025, 12:12PMNuclear News

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 U.S. companies to produce the fuel needed for test reactors the DOE expects to authorize under the Reactor Pilot Program announced in June. Like the reactors they’re meant to fuel, the fabrication facilities would be built on sites outside the DOE’s national laboratories but authorized by the DOE under “a fast-tracked approach to enable future commercial licensing activities for potential applicants.”

House Oversight Committee schedules hearing on nuclear energy

July 21, 2025, 9:30AMNuclear News

Burlison

Rep. Eric Burlison (R., Mo.), the chairman of the U.S. House Oversight and Accountability Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs, has announced a hearing on “The New Atomic Age: Advancing America’s Energy Future.”

The hearing will take place on Tuesday, July 22, at 1:00 pm (ET). Witnesses include Alex Epstein, president and founder of the Center for Industrial Progress, and Joshua Smith, energy policy lead at the Abundance Institute.

Details: According to the chairman’s office, the hearing will explore recent developments in nuclear energy technology, the commercial viability of advanced reactors, supply chain challenges, and policy pathways for Congress to strengthen nuclear power in the United States.

IAEA launches infographic design contest on nuclear preparedness and response

July 21, 2025, 7:03AMNuclear News

The International Atomic Energy Agency has launched an infographic design contest for young professionals aged 18 to 35 to raise awareness about emergency preparedness and response (EPR) in nuclear and radiological contexts.

Contest guidelines and terms can be found here.

Kairos project moves ahead at Oak Ridge

July 18, 2025, 9:29AMNuclear News
The ETU 3.0 reactor vessel was lowered into position using construction cranes and mounted on a support structure attached to the building’s foundation. (Photo: Kairos Power)

A reactor vessel has been installed by Kairos Power for its third Engineering Test Unit (ETU 3.0) at the company’s campus in Oak Ridge, Tenn.