BWX Technologies announced on March 11 that its BWXT Nuclear Operations Group (BWXT NOG) subsidiary had been awarded a contract from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to manufacture TRISO nuclear fuel to support the continued development of the Transformational Challenge Reactor (TCR). Plans to restart a TRISO production line at the company’s Lynchburg, Va., manufacturing site will be finalized to allow for production to be completed by the fall of 2020.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently identified a number of what it refers to as “apparent violations” of agency regulations at Tennessee Valley Authority nuclear facilities.

On March 2, the NRC issued TVA an Office of Investigation (OI) report, which pointed to an apparent violation of employee protection requirements at the utility’s Sequoyah nuclear plant, located near Soddy-­Daisy, Tenn. According to the report, a former Sequoyah employee had been “constructively discharged” for raising concerns from 2015 to 2018 with TVA’s Corporate Nuclear Licensing group regarding regulatory noncompliance and for expressing concerns about a chilled work environment. The former employee reportedly expressed these concerns both to TVA’s Employee Concern Program and to other employees.

A group of Republican senators on March 2 penned a letter to Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Kristine Svinicki to express their support for the ROP Enhancement Initiative—an effort to assess and modernize the agency’s nuclear safety inspection program, better known as the Reactor Oversight Process. The letter was signed by Sens. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works; Jim Inhofe (R., Okla.); Shelley Moore Capito (R., W.Va.); Kevin Cramer (R., N.D.); Mike Braun (R., Ind.); Mike Rounds (R., S.D.); John Boozman (R., Ark.); and Roger Wicker (R., Miss.).

National laboratories from Canada and the United Kingdom have developed an action plan under an existing memorandum of understanding designed to boost collaboration across the areas of clean energy, medical isotopes, waste management, and decommissioning. Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL), Canada’s nuclear science and technology organization, and the National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL), the nuclear services technology provider owned and operated by the United Kingdom, announced the plan on March 4. The agreement will address shared challenges in relation to climate change, public health, and environmental stewardship.

Leningrad:Unit II-1 has been credited with a nearly 15 percent decrease in cooling water usage at the plant. Photo: Rosatom

Using a VVER-1200 reactor for Leningrad II Unit 1 has resulted in a nearly 15 percent reduction in cooling water usage at the Leningrad nuclear power plant, according to Rosatom, Russia’s state atomic energy corporation. “The design features of the new power units can significantly reduce the amount of water consumed by a nuclear power plant from natural reservoirs,” said Vladimir Pereguda, director of the plant. He credited the replacing of RBMK-1000 units with VVER-1200 ones for a decrease of 730.7 million cubic meters of seawater withdrawn from Kopory Bay, a 14.8 percent drop in 2019 compared to 2018. Kopory Bay is located in the southern part of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. “We will continue to observe such indicators to reduce the environmental impact, since the Leningrad [plant] is gradually replacing RBMK-1000 units with VVER-1200 units,” Pereguda added.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on February 21 released its fourth and final report on its review of possible approaches to treating low-­activity waste at the Hanford Site. The Department of Energy plans to vitrify approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, which is currently under construction at Hanford. The waste will be separated into high-­level waste and low-­activity waste (LAW) streams before being turned into a solid glass form through vitrification. Not all of the LAW, however, will be vitrified, and the DOE has not determined a treatment method for the excess waste, called supplemental LAW (SLAW).

A report released to the public on February 20 by the Government Accountability Office concluded that maintenance inspections at several contaminated excess facilities at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site, near Richland, Wash., have not been comprehensive and that there are areas of some facilities that personnel infrequently or never enter, either physically or by remote means, to conduct inspections. The GAO reviewed surveillance and maintenance (S&M) requirements and activities at 18 of Hanford’s approximately 800 excess facilities that require cleanup and found that improvements to the site’s S&M program are needed.

David Gandy, the senior technical executive for nuclear materials at the Electric Power Research Institute, is charged with leading a project to lower the costs and manufacturing time for small modular reactors and advanced reactors. The Department of Energy–funded project is led by EPRI, and its collaborators include the United Kingdom–based Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Center and Oregon-based reactor developer NuScale Power. The testing has focused on producing the upper and lower pressure vessel assemblies for NuScale’s 60-megawatt SMR.

Gandy said that the project team has already produced a 3,650-pound reactor upper head at 44 percent scale and has made other components as heavy as 7,000 pounds. Over the next two years, if the tests still to be conducted are successful, EPRI plans to transfer the technologies to other reactor manufacturers. Gandy expects these new technologies to be available in about five to seven years, once the testing is completed and the necessary approvals are obtained from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and ASME.

Gandy talked about the project with Nuclear News Editor-in-Chief Rick Michal.

An overhead view of the inside of Vogtle-4's containment vessel in February. Photo: Georgia Power

Georgia Power, primary owner of the Vogtle nuclear plant near Waynesboro, Ga., has ordered the first nuclear fuel load for Vogtle-4, completing the initial fuel order necessary for the startup of the reactor, as well as its twin, Unit 3, the company announced on March 5.

The third Strategic Dialogue on Energy between government officials from Poland and the United States was held on February 26 as a way to extend the nations’ advanced nuclear energy cooperation. U.S. Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette met with Piotr Naimski, Poland’s secretary of state in the chancellery of the prime minister and plenipotentiary for strategic energy infrastructure, and Poland’s Minister of Climate Michal Kurtyka at the Department of Energy headquarters in Washington, D.C. In a DOE press release, Brouillette acknowledged the U.S. nuclear industry’s continued interest in providing clean, reliable, and resilient nuclear energy to Poland as a means to strengthen their energy security. In a post on Twitter, Kurtyka described the meeting as “fruitful.”

In its report for fiscal year 2019, published in February, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Office of Investigations (OI) shows a total case inventory that continues its downward trend: OI reported 160 cases in FY 2019, down 18 percent from 195 in FY 2018. The number of cases in 2015, 2016, and 2017 were 235, 231, and 209, respectively.

Exelon Generation’s Peach Bottom-2 and -3, located in Delta, Pa., have joined Florida Power & Light Company’s Turkey Point-3 and -4 as the only U.S. nuclear reactors licensed to operate for a total of 80 years.

On March 5, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued subsequent license renewals to Exelon for the Peach Bottom boiling water reactors, with expiration dates of August 8, 2053, for Unit 2, and July 2, 2054, for Unit 3. The FPL units received their first--in--the-nation SLRs last December (NN, Jan. 2020, p. 15).

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is issuing a proposed interpretation of its low-­level radioactive waste disposal regulations that would permit licensees to dispose of waste by transfer to persons who hold specific disposal exemptions. The NRC said that it will consider approval of requests for specific exemptions only if they are for the disposal of very low-­level radioactive waste by land burial. Notice of the proposed interpretive rule was published in the March 6 Federal Register.

Visitors explore the exhibits and interactive displays at the K-25 History Center at Oak Ridge. Photo: DOE

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management and its contractor URS/CH2M Oak Ridge hosted a ribbon-­cutting ceremony on February 27 for the new K-­25 History Center on the site of the former uranium enrichment plant. Located next to the original foundation for the K-­25 building, the center was built to honor and preserve the stories of the workers who constructed and operated the K-­25 complex during World War II and the Cold War.

Speaking before the House Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development on March 3, Rita Baranwal, the Department of Energy’s assistant secretary for nuclear energy, said that the DOE has prepared a request for proposal for an interim storage site for radioactive waste. “The intent is for the basic design of an interim storage facility,” she said.

A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office concludes that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s fee-setting, billing, and budgeting processes have improved in recent years, but that industry stakeholders continue to identify challenges with these processes and that further enhancements should be implemented.

In a summary report released to its membership on March 3, the Nuclear Energy Institute lauded the nation’s commercial nuclear industry for reactor performance in 2019, citing “record highs” in electricity generation and capacity factors.

The Department of Energy announced on March 4 that it will provide $30 million for new research on fusion energy. The funding will provide $17 million for research focused specifically on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) approaches for the prediction of key plasma phenomena, management of facility operations, and accelerated discovery through data science, among other topics. An additional $13 million under a separate funding opportunity will be devoted to fundamental fusion theory research, including computer modeling and simulation, focused on factors affecting the behavior of hot plasmas confined by magnetic fields in fusion reactors.

The Senate on March 12 confirmed Republican James Danly to a seat on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by a vote of 52 to 40. All GOP senators voted to confirm, as well as three Democrats often described as “centrist”: West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources (ENR) Committee’s ranking member; Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema; and Alabama’s Doug Jones.

On February 27, Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska) and Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) introduced the American Energy Innovation Act (AEIA), a 555-­page piece of policy legislation that incorporates over 50 energy-­related bills considered and individually reported by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last year—measures sponsored or cosponsored by more than 60 senators from both sides of the aisle.