The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is gearing up to tackle an influx of licensing requests and oversight of advanced nuclear reactor technology, especially small modular reactors.

TerraPower has continued to make aggressive progress in several areas for its Natrium Reactor Demonstration Project since the beginning of the year. Natrium is an advanced 345-MWe reactor that has liquid sodium as a coolant, improved fuel utilization, enhanced safety features, and an integrated energy storage system, allowing for a brief power output boost to 500 MWe if needed for grid resiliency. The company broke ground for its first Natrium plant in 2024 near a retiring coal facility in Kemmerer, Wyo.

A new report from the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center follows up on its 2024 workshops with recommendations for deploying advanced nuclear energy in the Appalachian area to spur economic development.

As part of a broader series on the future of the global energy markets, S&P Global has released a new report examining the growing interest in nuclear energy as the solution to many of the problems the energy sector faces.

Seven members of the inaugural Nuclear News 40 Under 40 came together on March 4 to discuss the current state of nuclear energy and what the future might hold for science, industry, and the public in terms of nuclear development.

To hear more insights from this talented group of young professionals, watch the “40 Under 40 Roundtable: Perspectives from Nuclear’s Rising Stars” on the ANS website.

Scientists at Idaho National Laboratory continue to make progress on the Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment (MCRE), which entails research and development for the first operational advanced nuclear reactor to use a mixture of molten chloride salt and uranium as fuel and coolant. The experiment is evaluating the safety and physics of the molten chloride fast reactor that Southern Company and TerraPower are planning to build.

Aiming to deploy the nation's first small modular reactor, TerraPower has announced contracts for the final long-lead items needed for its Natrium unit, currently under construction in Wyoming.

Penn State and Westinghouse Electric Company are working together to site a new research reactor on Penn State’s University Park, Pa., campus: Westinghouse’s eVinci, a HALEU TRISO-fueled sodium heat-pipe reactor. Penn State has announced that it submitted a letter of intent to host and operate an eVinci reactor to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on February 28 and plans to engage with the NRC on specific siting decisions. Penn State already boasts the Breazeale reactor, which began operating in 1955 as the first licensed research reactor at a university in the United States. At 70, the Breazeale reactor is still in operation.

The French magnetic confinement fusion tokamak known as WEST maintained a plasma in February for more than 22 minutes—1,337 seconds, to be precise—and “smashed” the previous record plasma duration for a tokamak with a 25 percent improvement, according to the CEA, which operates the machine. The previous 1,006-second record was set by China’s EAST just a few weeks prior. Records are made to be broken, but this rapid progress illustrates a collective, global increase in plasma confinement expertise, aided by tungsten in key components.

A panel on the potential of artificial intelligence to accelerate small modular reactors was held at the World Governments Summit (WGS) in February in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The OECD Nuclear Energy Agency cohosted the event, which attracted leaders from developers, IT companies, regulators, and other experts.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is conducting a special inspection at Hope Creek nuclear plant in New Jersey to investigate the cause of repeated inoperability of one of the plant’s emergency diesel generators, the agency announced in a February 25 news release.

North Carolina State University and the Electric Power Research Institute have been awarded a $500,000 grant by the NC Collaboratory for “An Assessment to Define Advanced Reactor Workforce Needs,” a project that aims to investigate job needs to help enable new nuclear development and deployment in North Carolina and surrounding areas. 

February has been big for nuclear in the state of Texas. On February 2, Governor Greg Abbott declared “It’s time for Texas to lead a nuclear power renaissance in the United States.” Two days later, Texas A&M University invited four advanced reactor developers—Aalo Atomics, Kairos Power, Natura Resources, and Terrestrial Energy—to build nuclear capacity on its RELLIS campus. On February 18 Natura announced plans for two 100-MWe molten salt reactors—one at TAMU RELLIS and the other in the Permian Basin—through a partnership with the Texas Produced Water Consortium and Texas Tech University. And today, Last Energy announced plans to site 30 microreactors—20-MWe pressurized water reactors—at a 200-acre site in northwestern Texas to power data centers.

Muhammad Rafiul Abdussami is hoping to “shape a brighter future” through innovative approaches to nuclear engineering. The young native of Bangladesh, who is known to friends and colleagues as Rafiul, is a doctoral student in his third year in the University of Michigan’s Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences (UMich NERS). He expects to graduate in December 2026. He is also enrolled in the Science, Technology, and Public Policy (STPP) graduate certificate program in the UMich Ford School of Public Policy.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has sent a February 26 letter to George Wilson, vice president of regulatory affairs for TerraPower, informing him that the agency’s draft safety evaluation (SE) has been completed on the company’s construction permit application for Kemmerer Power Station Unit 1. This advanced non–light water reactor design, dubbed Natrium, is slated for construction near a retiring coal plant in Wyoming as TerraPower’s first reactor.

Following the release of a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on the future of advanced nuclear reactors in the United States, experts in policymaking, finance, regulation, community engagement, and energy technologies convened a workshop recently on how a safe and secure foundation for the nuclear industry going forward can be laid.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has published its 2024–2025 Information Digest, NUREG-1350, Vol. 35, which describes the agency’s responsibilities and activities and provides general information regarding nuclear-related topics.

According to the NRC, the digest is intended to be a quick reference with important facts about the NRC and the industry it regulates presented publicly in an “easy-to-understand format” with visual aids.

The NRC published the digest annually from 1989 until 2023, when the agency switched to a two-year publication cycle. The next digest containing updated data will be published in February 2027.

The United Kingdom’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has announced that it will establish a Plutonium Ceramics Academic Hub with the Universities of Manchester and Sheffield. The announcement follows a decision by the U.K. government in January to immobilize the country’s inventory of civil separated plutonium at the Sellafield nuclear site, mitigating the material’s long-term safety and security risks.

Leaders from Holtec International and Hyundai Engineering & Construction gathered at the Palisades site in western Michigan today to announce an “expanded cooperation agreement” to build a 10-GW fleet of Holtec-designed SMR-300s in North America. That fleet’s first builds would be at Palisades, where Holtec is now focused on restarting the site’s shuttered 777-MWe pressurized water reactor by the end of this year. Under the “Mission 2030” plan launched today, Holtec would then build a pair of SMR-300 PWRs at the Palisades site—targeting operation in 2030.

Merz

The conservative Christian Democratic Union came out on top in Germany’s February 23 election. CDU leader Friedrich Merz achieved a “lackluster win,” as the Associated Press termed it, but his party’s political agenda could mean a revival for nuclear energy in Germany.

The country shut down its final nuclear reactor in 2023, in large part as a reaction to the 2011 accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Now many Germans are taking a renewed interest in clean, reliable nuclear power.

First, Merz and the CDU need to form a coalition to secure at least 316 votes in Parliament before he can be formally elected chancellor of Germany, the AP reports. Provisional results shared by Politico show that the CDU carried 28.5 percent of Sunday’s vote, trailed by the Alternative for Germany Party with 20.8 percent, the Social Democratic Party with 16.4 percent, and Alliance 90/the Greens with 11.6 percent.