Nuclear News

Yesterday, Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced that the Department of Energy has committed funding to develop a fusion breeding blanket test facility at the lab in partnership with Kyoto Fusioneering, and the company announced it will be relocating its U.S. headquarters to Oak Ridge, Tenn., with support from the state of Tennessee’s Nuclear Energy Supply Chain Investment Fund.

Constellation signed new long-term power purchase agreements during the second quarter that will ultimately provide roughly 920 MW in nuclear power to these new partners.

These nuclear contracts were among the topics Constellation executives broached during the second-quarter earnings call, along with existing power generation, the Crane restart, and New York and Illinois’s nuclear energy plans.

On August 11, Elemental Nuclear announced that the Department of Energy, through Sandia National Laboratories, approved its entrance into a Strategic Partnership Project. The SPP will support the development of Elemental’s supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO₂)–based Brayton cycle generator systems.

Researchers conducted experiments in Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory’s Lithium Tokamak Experiment-Beta (LTX-β) showing glow discharge cleaning can be used to effectively clean samples of porous tungsten—used to hold liquid lithium in fusion machine inner walls—manufactured from powder-reconstituted materials, according to a paper published in Nuclear Materials and Energy.

Tungsten is widely used for plasma-facing components in fusion machines, especially in the divertor region where materials must withstand extreme levels of power flow. According to the paper, spark plasma sintering can be used to make tungsten into spongelike samples for holding liquid lithium.

The Department of Energy has reported that its Hanford Field Office has submitted two permit modification requests to the Washington State Department of Ecology that could speed up the cleanup of the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. The requests “represent the latest step in a science-backed dual glass-plus-grout strategy to eliminate risks posed by aging tanks and meet cleanup commitments to the people of Washington more quickly, safely and efficiently,” the DOE said.

The fourth unit of Slovakia’s Mochovce nuclear power plant has achieved criticality, operator Slovenské Elektrárne has announced. Unit 4 reached the milestone at 10:10 p.m. local time on August 6. Twenty-one minutes later, the reactor reached its minimum controlled power level.

In recent weeks, states around the nation have taken various steps forward in the development of their nuclear sectors, including in Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, and Utah. Read on for a roundup of events.

Dozens of elected officials in California are urging Gov. Gavin Newsom and the California Legislature to act this year to extend operations at Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant past 2030.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has proposed a change to how it will approach standards for radiation protections, notably including the elimination of the “as low as reasonably achievable” (ALARA) principle. The proposed change was published in the Federal Register on July 15, and yesterday the agency held a public meeting on the topic.

In the meeting, Mike Franovich, director of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research, gave a presentation summarizing the changes, and NRC staff answered questions from participants. The meeting facilitator, Lance Rakovan, described it as a “very popular meeting,” drawing more than 550 participants, and the NRC staff was unable to address all questions in the scheduled time.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s proposed rule on modernizing reactor licensing, safety oversight, and siting practices ran over 550 pages when it was unveiled in July. To address the massive rulemaking, the NRC held three meetings last week to address all the topics.

At the third and final meeting, NRC staff addressed license and permit durations, 10 CFR Parts 52 and 54 enhancements, changes to emergency preparedness, and decommissioning financial assurances for new reactor applicants.

Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org

Who would have thought, just a few years ago, that we would see so many long-standing barriers to new nuclear development falling like dominoes? Public opinion, policy, regulatory reform, finance and investment, design maturity, nuclear fuel enrichment, and fuel fabrication capacity have all advanced with remarkable speed in the United States.

Conventional wisdom holds that the most effective way to scale up the nuclear supply chain is to do so strategically, matching investments to the needs of reactor developers.

Recent research out of the United Kingdom and Germany is offering promising advances in the understanding of fusion plasmas, potentially bringing the dream of commercial fusion energy closer to reality.

Mark Peters
president@ans.org

One month into my term as president of the American Nuclear Society, it is already clear that the nuclear field continues to move quickly. June alone brought a striking number of developments, each one pointing to the momentum of this moment.

Antares’s Mark-0 microreactor reaching criticality at Idaho National Laboratory was more than a technical milestone. It effectively brought reactor No. 53 on line at a site that has shaped much of the nation’s nuclear history, with 52 reactors built there since 1951. And more criticality starts were delivered in June and July, enabled by the Department of Energy and its partnerships with private companies.

At the same time, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is continuing its broad regulatory reform effort, and nuclear technology is being used to help combat an outbreak of New World screwworm that has spread to the United States.

A pair of bills were introduced earlier this month in Congress that could modernize the licensing process for uranium enrichment facilities and repeal the law that designated Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the country’s nuclear waste repository.

The “world’s first industrial-scale final disposal facility for spent nuclear fuel,” planned for the Finnish island of Olkiluoto, has received a favorable safety assessment from the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority of Finland (STUK). Ilkka Poikolainen, the president and CEO of Posiva, the waste management company that has been developing the Onkalo facility for decades, characterized the assessment as “a highly significant and positive milestone in the operating license process.”

The dust is beginning to settle following the whirlwind of changes at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over the past year, and 2025 ultimately may be viewed as a transformative year, as well as the year the NRC celebrated its golden anniversary. The 12 months of that milestone year brought more change to the agency in its composition, its mandate, and its relationship to the executive branch than any comparable period in the preceding four decades.

Now at 51 years and counting, the NRC is working with a full commission and issuing new rulemakings to both regulate and support the next round of nuclear deployments. With the turbulence of 2025 still fresh in our minds, Nuclear News decided it was a good time to revisit the professional backgrounds of all 42 NRC commissioners who have served over the agency’s 50-year history to see how the composition of the commission has evolved over time.

Centrus Energy Corp. will be providing X-energy with enrichment services for low-enriched uranium and high-assay, low-enriched uranium to support X-energy’s planned deployments of Xe-100 small modular reactors and TRISO-X fuel, according to the terms of a new contract signed by the companies. The fuel will be produced at Centrus’s American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio. In turn, X-energy will provide Centrus with prepayments to help support expanding the capacity of Centrus’s domestic commercial enrichment program.

Philippe (left) and Manzuk quantified the amount of uranium that has been exported from the DRC in cobalt shipments or left behind in the environment. (Photo: Joel Hallberg/UW–Madison)

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Princeton University have published a study in Nature Communications that calls attention to a blind spot in nuclear nonproliferation: The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has exported thousands of metric tons of uranium, and there is no accounting for where it has gone.

In partnership with Lighthouse Reports and the Financial Times, UW–Madison nuclear engineering professor and nuclear security expert Sébastien Philippe and Ryan Manzuk, a geologist and research fellow in Philippe’s group and at Princeton, conducted the study using countrywide mineralization and geochemical data.

Fusion Upscaled Leveraged Consortia for Rapid Acceleration (FULCRA) is the new public-private partnership between Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Rutherford Energy Ventures, a fusion consultancy company headquartered in Cambridge, Mass. FULCRA intends to create shared fusion test bed infrastructure at ORNL to serve as a design and funding model for similar test facilities at other national laboratories.

Oklo’s Groves Isotope Test Reactor became the fifth Department of Energy–authorized reactor to achieve criticality under the agency’s authorization process, it was announced earlier today.

Criticality was reached at 9:19 p.m. (EDT) on Wednesday at the company’s Groves facility in Lockhart, Texas, according to the DOE.