The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management recently announced that, with the help of contractor Central Plateau Cleanup Company, it has completed the safe demolition of the 175-foot-tall exhaust stack of the K West reactor at the Hanford Site in Washington state.

Canada’s first in situ recovery (ISR) uranium mining operation has been granted final regulatory approval. Toronto-based Denison Mines Corp. announced last week that the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has approved the environmental assessment and issued the license to construct a mine and mill for the company’s Wheeler River uranium project, located in northern Saskatchewan’s Athabasca basin. This project, which includes the Phoenix uranium deposit, previously received the necessary provincial approvals.

For the past several years, the University of North Carolina–Wilmington has hosted volunteer instructors from Wilmington-­based GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy who teach engineering courses and engage with students. This guest instructor program has grown under the guidance of Amy Craig Reamer, associate professor of practice and director of engineering in the UNCW College of Science and Engineering’s Department of Computer Science. Under her oversight, an informal but strong public-­private partnership has been established to the benefit of UNCW students and the wider Wilmington community.

A new strategic partnership is providing Kairos Power with the expertise and specialized facilities of Oak Ridge National Laboratory to help accelerate the development of the California-based company’s Hermes. This partnership is the fourth between ORNL and Kairos Power since 2020, and it is focused in part on the manufacture and management of TRISO fuel pebbles for the fluoride salt–cooled, high-temperature demonstration reactor now under construction in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Idaho National Laboratory and computer chip maker Nvidia have announced a public-private partnership to advance nuclear energy deployment through artificial intelligence. According to INL, the collaboration aims to cut reactor development times in half and reduce operational costs by 50 percent by using AI to design, license, manufacture, construct, and operate reactors with human-in-the-loop workflows.

Gov. Tony Evers delivering his 2026 State of the State address. (Photo: Tony Evers/YouTube @Governor Tony Evers)

During his State of the State address on February 17, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers announced the launch of a new nuclear siting study that will be undertaken by a partnership between the Public Service Commission (PSC) of Wisconsin and the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

The U.S. nuclear industry took a further step to solidify its influence in Central Europe on February 16, when U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán signed the U.S.-Hungary Civil Nuclear Intergovernmental Agreement, potentially setting the stage for decades of cooperation in civilian nuclear energy between the two countries. This new agreement comes one month after the signing of a similar agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy and the government of Slovakia.

A Nuclear Regulatory Commission Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) will hear arguments on February 26 on challenges to a construction permit application from Long Mott Energy (LME) for a multiunit reactor facility at Dow Chemical Company’s Seadrift site in Calhoun, Texas. LME is a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow.

Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker issued a new executive order (EO) on February 18 directing both the Illinois Power Agency and the Illinois Commerce Commission to issue a notice of intent (NOI) to potential developers of new nuclear power plants.

The signing of that EO took place on the same day Pritzker delivered his 2026 State of the State address, in which he set a goal of building at least 2 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity in the state.

The Roy G. Post Foundation has announced the awarding of 87 scholarships totaling more than $500,000 for graduate and undergraduate students demonstrating excellent academic achievements, leadership qualities, and positive impacts in their communities.

On February 13 at the African Union (AU) Summit held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the AU, the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, and the African Commission on Nuclear Energy (AFCONE) signed a memorandum of understanding to cooperate on the support of nuclear science and technology development across Africa.

Westinghouse Electric Company’s plans to deploy its AP1000 reactor in Poland have taken an important step forward with a credit agreement between the Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM) and Polskie Elektrownie Jądrowe (PEJ). The agreement represents the first phase of financing to support the initial engineering and environmental site work needed before construction can begin on Poland’s first nuclear power plant, at the Lubiatowo-Kopalino site in the Choczewo municipality of Pomerania.

At Idaho National Laboratory, researchers have built a bridge between computer models and the lab’s Microreactor Applications Research Validation and Evaluation (MARVEL) microreactor.

Tony Crawford, an INL researcher and MARVEL’s reactivity control system lead, designed a phone booth–sized surrogate nuclear reactor called ViBRANT, or Visual Benign Reactor as Analog for Nuclear Testing, which uses light instead of neutrons to show a “nuclear” reaction.

Two start-ups working to commercialize fusion energy made headlines last week. Helion Energy announced that its Polaris prototype fusion energy machine recently demonstrated measurable deuterium-tritium fusion and achieved a plasma temperature of 150 million degrees Celsius (MºC). Newcomer Inertia Enterprises announced that it has raised $450 million in its Series A fundraising round.

Valar Atomics’ Ward250 microreactor is loaded onto the aircraft.

A public-private partnership between the Departments of Defense and Energy and Valar Atomics marked a milestone over the weekend when Valar’s Ward250 microreactor was transported (without fuel) from California to Utah using three C-17 aircraft. The reactor will now trek from Hill Air Force Base to the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab (URSEL) for testing and evaluation.

The Nuclear Scaling Initiative, a collaborative effort launched in 2024 to spur new nuclear energy development, announced a new campaign promoting the direct disposal of spent nuclear fuel as the safest, most secure, and least expensive pathway for managing U.S. nuclear waste.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has granted X-energy subsidiary TRISO-X a special nuclear material license for high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel fabrication. The license applies to TRISO-X’s first two planned commercial facilities, known as TX-1 and TX-2, for an initial 40-year period. The facilities are set to be the first new nuclear fuel fabrication plants licensed by the NRC in more than 50 years.

Ontario Power Generation has signed a partnership agreement with the city of Port Hope focused on bringing “large-scale new nuclear generation” to the utility’s Wesleyville location, a 1,300-acre site on the shores of Lake Ontario that has been left undeveloped for four decades. The Ontario government believes that this site has the potential to generate as much as 10 GW of electricity and become “the world’s largest nuclear station,” in the words of Stephen Lecce, the province’s minister of energy and mines.

The state of New Mexico is fining the Department of Energy for nearly $16 million, claiming the department has failed to prioritize the removal legacy nuclear waste from Los Alamos National Laboratory for disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the DOE’s deep geologic repository for defense-related transuranic waste near Carlsbad, N.M.

The Department of Energy’s newly published Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges describes 26 challenges and corresponding AI solutions designed to advance the artificial intelligence–focused Genesis Mission, which was established by presidential executive order last November to develop an “integrated platform that connects the world’s supercomputers, experimental facilities, AI systems, and unique datasets across every major scientific domain to double the productivity and impact of American research and innovation within a decade.”