The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) is forming an ad hoc committee to hold a two-day workshop titled “Pathways for New Nuclear Development” and is open to recommendations from the public through August 30. NASEM is seeking five or six volunteer experts to discuss the “real and perceived risks of new nuclear projects and their projected timelines” as committee members and is also looking for potential speakers, participants, and peer reviewers for any publications that could be produced following the workshop.

The adulterating of food products for financial gain, either through dilution, substitution, mislabeling, or other action, has become a lucrative industry. And because food fraud is designed to avoid detection, gauging its financial impacts can be difficult. Experts estimate that food fraud affects 1 percent of the global food industry at a cost of about $10 billion to $15 billion a year, with some estimates putting the cost as high as $40 billion a year, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The California legislature has signaled its intent to cancel a $400 million loan payment intended to help finance a longer lifespan for the state’s last nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon.

TerraPower has announced its selection of industry experts Sargent & Lundy to design the Kemmerer Training Center for its Natrium reactor demonstration project in Wyoming.

Federal regulators began an investigation this week at the Donald C. Cook nuclear plant around the circumstances of multiple diesel generator failures. The facility continues to operate safely.

Waste Management Symposia announced that the theme of next year’s Waste Management Conference (WM2025) will be “Empowering A Sustainable Future—Advanced Technologies, AI, and Workforce Development across the Nuclear Landscape.” To be held in Phoenix, Ariz., March 9–13, the conference will showcase how new technologies and the evolving digital world are transforming the global nuclear landscape, supply chains, infrastructure, and work norms.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has issued a final request for proposals for an infrastructure support services (ISS) contract at the department’s Paducah Site in Kentucky, which is the former home of the Paducah gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment plant. DOE-EM has conducted extensive cleanup and environmental remediation activities at the site since the late 1980s.

Craig Harrington and Scott Palmtag are the newest members of the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards.

They were appointed yesterday by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to the independent advisory body tasked with reviewing safety studies and facility license applications. In addition, Walter Kirchner and Matthew Sunseri were reappointed.

The State of Ohio and FirstEnergy reached a settlement this week to avoid prosecution in an ongoing corruption investigation involving the Davis-Besse and Perry nuclear plants.

In 2021, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Ohio charged the energy company with conspiring “with public officials and other individuals and entities to pay millions of dollars to public officials in exchange for specific official action for FirstEnergy Corp.’s benefit.”

FirstEnergy will pay $19.5 million to the attorney general’s office within five business days and will pay $500,000 for an independent consultant to review and confirm unspecified “changes and remediation efforts” within the company. The company will also cooperate with investigators for two years or until the investigation, litigation, or prosecution is complete.

Team members at Oak Ridge National Laboratory achieved a milestone with the removal of a lower reactor vessel, according to a U.S. Department of Energy news release.

Workers with the Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) contractor UCOR successfully lifted and removed the lower reactor vessel from the Oak Ridge Research Reactor, also known as Building 3042.

A facility at Argonne National Laboratory has been simulating nuclear reactor cooling systems under a wide range of conditions since the 1980s. Its latest task, described by Argonne in an August 13 news release, is testing the performance of passive safety systems for new reactor designs.

Designed as a half-scale model of a real reactor system, Argonne’s Natural Convection Shutdown Heat Removal Test Facility (NSTF) is used for large-scale experimental testing of the performance of passive safety systems, which are designed to remove decay heat using natural forces including gravity and heat convection. Those tests yield benchmarking data qualified to the level of National Quality Assurance-1 (NQA-1) that is shared with vendors and regulators to validate computational models and guide licensing of new reactors and components.

QSA Global, a provider of radioisotope products, and Niowave, a Michigan-based producer of medical radioisotopes, announced that the companies will codevelop a scalable radium purification process using Niowave’s radium-226 processing technology to meet the demand for actinium-225, an alpha-emitter used in the treatment of cancer. According to the companies, the strategic partnership marks a significant advancement in the field of radiopharmaceutical technology, enhancing the supply chain for critical radioisotopes, including Ac-225.

Niowave uses a closed-loop cycle to produce high-purity Ac-225 and other alpha emitters from Ra-226 using a superconducting electron linear accelerator. According to the company’s website, the electron beam impinges on a photon converter to irradiate the Ra-226, inducing a photon-neutron reaction to Ra-225, which decays to Ac-225.

As Bruce Power continues predevelopment work, public input is being sought on the potential Bruce C nuclear power expansion project in Ontario.

Bruce Power recently submitted its initial project description to the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada for an expansion that would add up to 4,800 MWe. Earlier this year, the Canadian government announced up to C$50 million ($36.8 million) in funding for the Bruce C project, which would be Canada’s first major expansion of a large nuclear plant in decades.

The IAEA’s Milestones in the Development of a National Infrastructure for Nuclear Power was last revised back in 2015. Now, about nine years later and amid a resurgence of interest in nuclear power, the latest guidance on the IAEA’s Milestones Approach offers updated advice to policymakers in nations looking to introduce a nuclear power program or expand an existing fleet, encouraging them to evaluate infrastructure readiness before seeking bids from reactor vendors. For the first time, the guide includes an “annex” specific to small modular reactor deployments.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine recently made new appointments—including American Nuclear Society members Raymond Cao of Ohio State University and Alicia Walls of BWX Technologies—to the Ohio Nuclear Development Authority.

The nine-member governor-appointed board was created in June 2023 by state lawmakers aimed at boosting research and development of advanced nuclear reactors, commercial isotope production, and nuclear waste reduction and storage technology. The group has initial funding of $750,000.

Fifty-five high schoolers representing 14 Asian countries participated in an inaugural nuclear science competition earlier this month in the Philippines.

The event was held in the run-up to the United Nations’ International Youth Day, which is celebrated worldwide on August 12 to recognize and encourage the potential of young people as active partners in the global society. The nuclear field presents many opportunities for the next generation of scientists and engineers.

The OPTIMUS-H transportation cask from NAC International. (Photo: NAC)

NAC International announced that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has certified a highly shielded version of the company’s OPTIMUS (Optimal Modular Universal Shipping) transportation package for radioactive materials and waste. NAC’s OPTIMUS-H is now approved under 10 CFR Part 71 with Certificate of Compliance (CoC) USA/9392/B(U)F-96, effective Aug. 5, 2024.

The OPTIMUS-H CoC follows licensing approvals of the cask in Canada and Australia. Previously, the lightweight version of the OPTIMUS package, OPTIMUS-L, received certification from the NRC and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.

NAC unveiled its first OPTIMUS to the public at the 2020 Waste Management Conference in Phoenix. Since then, NAC has delivered 22 OPTIMUS-L and nine OPTIMUS-H systems to support North American packaging and transportation projects.

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has achieved fusion ignition at least five times, each time by directing its 192 high-powered lasers on a capsule containing a tiny, 2-millimeter target filled with hydrogen fuel. Not every shot achieves ignition, however. Tiny imperfections in the targets can mean fizzle, not fusion. But each of the targets used in successful experiments to date have something in common: they were characterized and selected by the 4Pi Integrated Metrology System, a new measurement system developed by General Atomics. Now, the team behind that system is being recognized.

GA announced last week that its Metrology Research and Development team had won the 2024 "Team of the Year" R&D 100 Professional Award from R&D World. The magazine that each year announces the R&D 100 awards that have been dubbed the “Oscars of Innovation” also selects just one “Team of the Year” and announces that award together with four other professional awards.

Bradley Williams

The United States is already off to a good start with respect to new nuclear deployment. The completion of Vogtle Units 3 and 4, the Natrium groundbreaking, and X-energy’s partnership with Dow Chemical to deploy an advanced reactor for industrial applications are all important first steps. These efforts are being complemented by the flurry of licensing activity with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and overwhelming support in Congress and the White House. But to achieve the current administration’s goal of tripling nuclear capacity by 2050, more needs to be done.

Thick, black smoke pouring from one of the cooling towers at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant over the weekend raised alarm about safety at the facility as the military conflict with Russia continues.

On-site staff from the International Atomic Energy Agency witnessed the smoke and reported hearing multiple explosions at Zaporizhzhia, which is the largest nuclear plant in Europe and one of the largest worldwide.