ANS Nuclear Cafe

Framatome was recently awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to perform mitigation of buried condenser feed pipes at a three-unit nuclear power plant in the United States.

The France-based nuclear company plans to install spray-in-place structural pipe liner to mitigate more than one mile of large diameter underground piping connected to plant condenser boxes. The project will be performed during nine outages over eight years, with the first application planned for fall 2025.

The U.K.-based Financial Times recently featured an article focusing on the return of retirees and the extending of professional careers in the nuclear industry in Western countries. According to the article, “the nuclear power industry is seeking to lure back thousands of retired engineers and older professionals as Western companies try to fill a skills gap to deliver the biggest wave of new projects in decades.”

The University of Michigan’s Fastest Path to Zero Initiative has launched the Global Fusion Forum, an online platform focused on fusion energy. It was created to foster international engagement and collaboration in the area of fusion technology.

Investor’s Business Daily reported May 10 that the first-quarter earnings of Constellation Energy, the largest operator of nuclear power plants in the United States, surged 858 percent to reach a share price of $2.78, partly as a result of promising expectations regarding demand for artificial intelligence data centers. The S&P 500 stock value of Constellation jumped 3.7 percent on May 8 to $208.

For American Nuclear Society members and Nuclear News subscribers, the 2024 Buyers Guide is now available in the ANS Digital Nuclear Library. The print version will be mailed along with the May “Capacity Factors/Nuclear Security” issue of Nuclear News magazine.

The corresponding ANS online Buyers Guide database is available year-round to all readers—updated with the latest products, services, and suppliers contact information for more than 600 nuclear-related companies.

The Department of Energy has issued a request for qualifications (RFQ) for interested parties that are looking to establish carbon pollution–free electricity (CFE) projects at its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant site in New Mexico.

Borisov

Russian space agency Roscosmos has announced its intention to build a nuclear reactor on the lunar surface in collaboration with the China National Space Administration. According to Roscosmos director general Yury Borisov, “Today we are seriously considering a project—somewhere at the turn of 2033–2035—to deliver and install a [nuclear] power unit on the lunar surface together with our Chinese colleagues.” The reactor would apparently be used to supply power to the Russian-Chinese International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), plans for which the two nations unveiled in 2021.

These plans come on top of previously announced plans of the United States and United Kingdom for lunar nuclear reactors.

Researchers from the University of Rochester in New York and the University of California–San Diego have published a paper in Physical Review Letters describing a previously unknown class of plasma oscillations. In “Space-Time Structured Plasma Waves,” the researchers “demonstrate that electrostatic wave packets structured with space-time correlations can have properties that are independent of the plasma conditions,” such as “density, temperature, ionization state, or details of the distribution functions.” This finding is technologically relevant, the authors note, because “electrostatic waves play a critical role in nearly every branch of plasma physics from fusion to advanced accelerators, to astro, solar, and ionospheric physics.”

Oppenheimer won all sorts of awards last Sunday at the Oscars, but how much Manhattan Project history do you really know?

Take the quiz now!

The spread of “electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories” throughout the United States is “leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid,” according to a recent article in the Washington Post. According to the report, the surge in industrial power requirements due to such factors as innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) and the corresponding construction of large computing infrastructure, is prompting some officials to “look beyond the grid” to ease the “grid bottleneck” and meet electricity demands.

A new report from the Breakthrough Institute has identified challenges and offers recommendations to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for fostering inclusive and transparent dialogue and engagement with the public.

Improving Nuclear Regulatory Commission Engagement: Enhancement to Ensure Transparency and Collaboration with the Public notes that despite recent agency efforts at improving public engagement, such as through website upgrades and additional community meetings, the NRC still tends to prioritize technical jargon and complex procedures rather than offer clear, accessible communication. This leads to alienating the interested public, including community members and other stakeholders, and fostering misconceptions.

According to a new report by the European energy analysis firm Montel EnAppSys, France was “comfortably” the biggest net exporter of energy in Europe throughout 2023, with its export totals being 48.7 TWh more than its import totals. In second place in Europe was Sweden, with 28.6 TWh more in exports than imports.

The Nuclear Sublime is a new large-format photobook that features fascinating and unusual photographs of the interiors of nuclear reactors and power plants across the United Kingdom.

The effort to build the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant in Somerset, England, has been “prodigious, lengthy, and increasingly costly.” So says London-based energy, business, and environment writer Stanley Reed in his recent New York Times article, “Why Britain Is Struggling with Nuclear Power.”

Angwin

Chemist, author, nuclear energy advocate, and ANS member Meredith Angwin recently reached out to David Blackmon about Juice: Power, Politics and the Grid, a series of five short videos that she calls “a splendid resource for people who want to know about the electric grid.” Blackmon, a writer and 40-year veteran of the energy industry who is a fan of both Angwin and the video shorts, reposted her review on his Substack, “Energy Transition Absurdities.”

The videos, produced by Austin, Texas–based filmmakers Robert Bryce and Tyson Culver, feature interviews with Angwin and others as they “expose the perils facing our electric grid [and show] how we can improve the reliability of our most important energy network and address climate change by embracing nuclear energy.”

What will happen to the retired nuclear-powered merchant ship, the N.S. Savannah? The Maritime Administration (MARAD) of the Department of Transportation is investigating possibilities for the vessel’s future, whether it be in disposition, transportation, or preservation.

Donalds

Fleischmann

Two U.S. representatives—Chuck Fleischmann (R., Tenn.) and Byron Donalds (R., Fla.)—have published an op-ed in the Washington Examiner that calls for the United States to seize “the current nuclear economic opportunity worldwide” and “once again be the world leader in nuclear power.” The congressmen emphasize that “it is in the best interest of the United States and the rest of the world for our country, instead of China and Russia, to be the preferred partner for embarking nuclear nations.”

Atoms for Peace: Fleischmann and Donalds argue that President Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” speech in 1953 established the foundational principles for the domestic and global success of the U.S. civil nuclear energy industry—and they urge the nation to reclaim those principles now. They point to the numerous benefits of nuclear energy, ranging from economic development to desalination to sustainable fuel creation, and note that the “global market is ripe for nuclear technology.”

On this holiday that celebrates all things love, here’s a look at the love affair that Kyle Hill has with nuclear energy—even its waste.

Love

The thriving gray wolf population in the Chernobyl exclusion zone (CEZ) has been the subject of recent media interest. While some sensationalist reports have referred to “mutant wolves” with “superpowers,” other news outlets have offered more sober discussions of the science behind the story.

Cara N. Love, a biologist and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, has been following the wolf population. Her research in the Chernobyl exclusion zone (CEZ) in Ukraine and Polesie State Radioecological Reserve in Belarus is helping biologists understand how nature adapts to chronic radiation exposure.

Lusztig

The documentary film Richland, which won awards at the Tribeca Festival and Sheffield (U.K.) DocFest last year, continues to gain exposure. Directed by Irene Lusztig, a self-described “feminist filmmaker, archival researcher, educator, and seamstress,” the documentary explores the community and “nuclear origin story” of Richland, Washington, a town that was built by the U.S. government to house Hanford Site workers who made the weapons-grade plutonium for the atomic bombs of the Manhattan Project.

Washington State University offered a free screening of the documentary last week at its main Pullman campus, followed by a discussion with the director and Robert Franklin, an assistant professor in history at the university’s Tri-Cities campus and the assistant director and archivist for the Hanford History Project.