The Chicago suburb of Oak Brook, Ill., will be the home of Nano Nuclear Energy’s regional demonstration and office facility to support development of the company’s Kronos micro modular reactor (MMR). The company recently purchased for $3.5 million a 2.75-acre parcel that includes land and a 23,537-square-foot standalone building with a 7,400-square-foot nonnuclear demonstration area.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright will attend the opening of the Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative in Aiken, S.C., on August 7. Wright will deliver remarks and join Savannah River National Laboratory leadership and partners for a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

The dust has settled: It’s been one month since President Trump signed H.R.1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, after a lengthy and contentious reconciliation process. As drafts of the bill evolved through committees, the House, and the Senate, the fate of federal support for nuclear energy projects was often obfuscated.

Fabrication of the reactor core for the 1.5-MW Project Pele demonstration microreactor has begun, according to BWX Technologies. Pele is being developed at the BWXT Innovation Campus in Lynchburg, Va., for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Strategic Capabilities Office.

Chris Wagner has more than 40 years of experience in nuclear medicine, beginning as a clinical practitioner before moving into leadership roles at companies like Mallinckrodt (now Curium) and Nordion. His knowledge of both the clinical and the manufacturing sides of nuclear medicine laid the groundwork for helping to found Eden Radioisotopes, a start-up venture that intends to make diagnostic and therapeutic raw material medical isotopes like molybdenum-99 and lutetium-177.

Lightbridge Corporation has fabricated samples of nuclear fuel materials made of an enriched uranium-zirconium alloy, matching the composition of the alloy that the company intends to use for its future commercial Lightbridge Fuel product. The fuel is designed to improve the performance, safety, and proliferation resistance of nuclear reactors, according to the company. The enriched coupon samples will now be placed into capsules for irradiation testing in Idaho National Laboratory’s Advanced Test Reactor.

The world’s first nuclear-powered merchant ship, the NS Savannah, will have a public site visit in Baltimore, Md., on Saturday, August 23.

To register for the event and find up-to-date details on the event’s address, time, and more, click here.

This year’s ANS-sponsored Nuclear Criticality Safety Division Conference (NCSD 2025) will be held at the AT&T Hotel & Conference Center in Austin, Texas, September 14–18.

To register for the event, explore the full program, and reserve your room at the host hotel, click here.

A report just released by Idaho National Laboratory reviews decades of radiation protection standards and research on the health effects of low-dose radiation and recommends that the current U.S. annual occupational dose limit of 5,000 mrem be maintained without applying ALARA—the “as low as reasonably achievable” regulatory concept first introduced in 1971—below that threshold.

Noting that epidemiological studies “have consistently failed to demonstrate statistically significant health effects at doses below 10,000 mrem delivered at low dose rates,” the report also recommends “future consideration of increasing this limit to 10,000 mrem/year with appropriate cumulative-dose constraints.”

Caputo

Commissioner Annie Caputo is resigning from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, according to a statement sent out to staff on Tuesday morning. Her resignation comes one day after the U.S. Senate voted to reconfirm chair David Wright to the commission.

“The time has come for me to more fully focus on my family,” Caputo said in her statement, provided by NRC spokesperson Scott Burnell. “I believe the [Trump] administration’s recent executive orders and the bipartisan ADVANCE Act have given the agency a platform for change.”

Munn

Nuclear engineer and longtime ANS member Wanda Munn died on July 23 at the age of 93. Described as a “trailblazer for women [and] an outspoken advocate for the peaceful use of nuclear technology” in her Tri-City (Wash.) Herald obituary, Munn followed a unique path to her nuclear engineering career. She did not get her degree until she was 46, and she subsequently spent 18 years working on systems design, construction, and operation of the Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF) reactor for Westinghouse at the Hanford nuclear site in eastern Washington state.

Nontraditional student: Munn was born in 1931. She graduated high school early, at age 16, and started to pursue a medical degree. However, those plans changed when she married at age 18. By her early 40s, she was divorced and working as a secretary in a university nuclear engineering department when she decided to return to school to get a nuclear engineering degree.

The American Nuclear Society’s Risk-informed, Performance-based Principles and Policy Committee (RP3C) has held another presentation in its monthly Community of Practice (CoP) series. Former RP3C chair N. Prasad Kadambi opened the June 27 meeting with brief introductory remarks about the RP3C and the need for new approaches to nuclear design that go beyond conventional and deterministic methods. He then welcomed this month’s speaker: Tim Sande, a senior manager responsible for probabilistic risk assessments (PRA) and risk-informed engineering at Enercon, who presented “A Risk-Informed Framework for Managing Nuclear Facility Security Risks.”

Watch the full webinar here.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has made three recent announcements regarding new developments in the nuclear energy industry:

The Department of Energy’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (MDF) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in partnership with Kairos Power and Barnard Construction, has successfully developed and validated large-scale, 3D-printed polymer composite forms for casting complex concrete structures.

The test took place at Kairos Power’s Oak Ridge, Tenn., campus, where the Hermes Low-Power Demonstration Reactor is currently under construction.

See a video of construction activity here.

The Palisades nuclear power plant has been formally transitioned from decommissioning status to holding an operating license following the completion of an extensive technical review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It’s a historic move; before this, no U.S. nuclear plant had ever made the transition from shut down to approved for restart.

The United States has tight new deadlines—18 months, max—for licensing commercial reactor designs. The Department of Energy is marshaling the nuclear expertise and high-performance computing assets of its national laboratories, in partnership with private tech companies, to develop generative AI tools and large-scale simulations that could help get nuclear reactor designs through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing process—or the DOE’s own reactor pilot program. “Accelerate” and “streamline” are the verbs of choice in recent announcements from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory, as they describe plans with Atomic Canyon, Microsoft, and Amazon.

The OECD Nuclear Energy Agency has published the third edition of the NEA Small Modular Reactor Dashboard, a comprehensive global review of SMR technology that defines criteria for assessing progress in the development of these advanced reactors. The assessments are based on six dimensions of readiness: licensing, siting, financing, supply chain, engagement, and fuel.

At the end of his July 15 speech at the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, President Trump promised that “a lot more [was] going to be announced in the coming week” for the energy and AI sectors.

A research team led by Canadian Nuclear Laboratories is studying a type of high-entropy alloy (HEA) that seems to withstand a cascade-involved irradiation environment at elevated temperatures better than stainless steel exposed to similar conditions. In a paper published in the Journal of Nuclear Materials, the researchers describe an HEA made of chromium, iron, manganese, and nickel (CrFeMnNi) that has the potential to improve the safety and functionality of nuclear reactors, as well as of spacecraft.

From 2003 to 2011, staff at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site downblended high-enriched uranium in the site’s H Canyon, producing over 300 metric tons (MT) of low-enriched uranium that was fabricated into fuel. The facility has since been idled, but downblending could soon begin again—this time to high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU).