ANS President Lisa Marshall recently sat down with Phil Zeringue, vice president of strategic partnerships at Nuclearn.ai to talk about the evolving state of education in the nuclear world.

Lawmakers are crossing the aisle to back proposals to expand nuclear power and nuclear research in the Badger State, especially as energy-hungry data center projects advance in Wisconsin and projections for energy demand soar.

The state has a goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 but will also need to generate more power to support data center plans, such as those being discussed in Port Washington and Beaver Dam, according to media reports.

The Department of Energy’s Hanford Field Office and Washington State Department of Ecology (Ecology) will hold a virtual public meeting on April 30 to learn more about the siting, construction, and operation of a proposed Contact-Handled Waste Processing Treatment and Storage Area at the DOE’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash.

Los Alamos National Laboratory recently performed a series of customized criticality experiments to obtain data that will support the transportation of HALEU TRISO fuel, the Department of Energy announced April 21.

Nearly 60 percent of staff at the U.S. Department of Energy’s nuclear-friendly Loan Programs Office may be lost through President Trump’s deferred resignation program, the Washington Examiner reported.

According to the news outlet, 123 of the 210 current LPO employees have opted into the retirement buyout, which would amount to a 58.5 percent staffing cut in the office that helps finance new nuclear projects among other energy proposals. There is a 45-day period for federal employees older than 40 to change their minds, which could impact the final number of exiting staff.

Bipartisan legislation introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this month seeks to close a loophole that currently allows medical patients to be unintentionally exposed to radiation without reporting or disclosure. The Nuclear Medicine Clarification Act of 2025 (H.R. 2541) was introduced into the House by Reps. Don Davis (D., N.C.), Morgan Griffith (R., Va.), and Ben Cline (R., Va.), who said the legislation would improve care and ensure transparency for patients and simplify federal rules coming from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

A recent American Nuclear Society webinar laid the basic groundwork in understanding radiation and the risks it presents. Robert Hayes, an associate professor of nuclear engineering at North Carolina State University and joint faculty member at Savannah River National Laboratory, presented “Radiological Risk in Perspective,” the latest online event in ANS’s Educator Training offerings.

In a Q&A posted on TVA’s website last week about a “new nuclear heyday,” Bob Deacy shared his vision for the Clinch River nuclear site in Oak Ridge, Tenn.—and some news about next steps for the company’s small modular reactor plans.

The Tennessee Valley Authority’s senior vice president for the Clinch River project, Deacy described his vision for up to four SMRs built on plots smaller than a football field with state-of-the-art digital equipment and a newly trained workforce providing reliable 24/7 power to the grid.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced it has awarded a contract worth nearly $153 million to North Wind Dynamics for infrastructure support services at the DOE’s Paducah Site in Kentucky. According to DOE-EM, the company, a small business based in Idaho Falls, Idaho, was chosen based on “key personnel, organization, and management approach, past performance, and value to taxpayers.”

Inertial fusion energy (IFE) developer Pacific Fusion, based in Fremont, Calif., announced this morning that it is on target to achieve net facility gain—more fusion energy out than all energy stored in the system—with a demonstration system by 2030, and backs the claim with a technical paper published yesterday on arXiv: “Affordable, manageable, practical, and scalable (AMPS) high-yield and high-gain inertial fusion.”

New ultrasonic testing equipment being used by the Department of Energy’s Idaho Cleanup Project (ICP) to confirm the integrity of thousands of legacy waste drums is saving taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management announced.

The technology allows ICP personnel to inspect the thickness transuranic waste drums held in storage at the DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory Site, ensuring they meet Department of Transportation minimum thickness requirements to be shipped for disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. According to DOE-EM, if drums meet the DOT thickness requirements, they can be loaded directly into shipping casks without the need for an expensive overpack container, leading to a minimum cost savings of $26 million.

BWX Technologies Inc. has purchased about 97 acres of land in an Oak Ridge, Tenn., industrial park where the company expects to build a uranium enrichment facility using a technology called DUECE, or, Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment. DUECE was developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to provide enriched uranium for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, and BWXT is several months into a yearlong engineering study to evaluate options for deploying a centrifuge pilot plant using DUECE.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has successfully removed legacy radioactive waste stored for more than five decades, marking a significant cleanup milestone. The Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) and cleanup contractor UCOR processed and shipped highly radioactive source material, including radium-226 and boron, out of state for permanent disposal.

A group of universities led by the American Association of Universities (AAU) acted swiftly to oppose a policy action by the Department of Energy that would cut the funds it pays to universities for the indirect costs of research under DOE grants. The group filed suit Monday, April 14, challenging a what it termed a “flagrantly unlawful action” that could “devastate scientific research at America’s universities.”

By Wednesday, the U.S. District Court judge hearing the case issued a temporary restraining order effective nationwide, preventing the DOE from implementing the policy or terminating any existing grants.

The University of Missouri announced today that it has signed a $10 million contract for the initial design phase of the $1 billion-plus state-of-the-art NextGen MURR research reactor project.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has doubled down on its rejection of an interconnection service agreement (ISA) between Amazon Web Services and Talen Energy in Pennsylvania.

Plans to bring a university research reactor like no other to the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) were punctuated last fall by the news that Ultra Safe Nuclear, the developer of the gas-cooled reactor technology selected for the Illinois Microreactor Project, had declared bankruptcy.

Researchers at GE Hitachi Nuclear recently completed a successful test on potential new building blocks made of steel-concrete composite.

The Defense Innovation Unit announced April 10 next steps in the Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations (ANPI) program, launched in 2024 to deploy microreactor nuclear systems for increased power reliability at select military locations.

Jarrell

Roger Jarrell will lead the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management as the new principal deputy assistant secretary. Jarrell, who served in the office during the first Trump administration, was named DOE-EM senior advisor in January. Prior to that, he served as the general counsel and previously was the government and stakeholder interface at DOE cleanup contractor UCOR, of Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Jarrell takes over the assistant secretary position, listed on DOE-EM’s organizational chart as EM-2, from Dae Chung, a long-serving DOE-EM executive who was tapped by the Trump administration in March to lead the office as acting principal deputy assistant secretary following the departure of Candice Robertson, who had led the office since June 2024.