Nuclear News

Used nuclear fuel storage and transportation have reached a critical juncture.

Dozens of utilities need reliable data on how used nuclear fuel performs in dry storage casks and canisters to extend regulatory licenses at sites across the United States. Likewise, the Department of Energy expects to take ownership of the used nuclear fuel—termed “spent nuclear fuel” in the laws and regulations governing its stewardship—and transfer it to one or more federal staging facilities for management and disposition.

Meanwhile, dozens of reactor companies are testing prototypes of advanced reactors and advanced reactor fuels. Eventually, regulators and industry must also verify the safety and security of storage methods for these advanced fuel types.

To help address these challenges, the DOE established the Center for Used Fuel Research (CUFR) in January 2026 for work related to the long-term storage and transport of used nuclear fuel.

As established by a commercial payload agreement, a radioisotope heating unit (RHU) developed by Zeno Power will be onboard one of Firefly Aerospace’s existing Blue Ghost missions to the near side of the moon as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, the companies announced yesterday.

Zeno, which has already been working on an americium-241–fueled radioisotope power system for Harmonia RPS, will provide a lightweight, compact 5-Wt Am-241 RHU that includes communications, electrical power, command and data handling, and thermal management subsystems.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is considering Orano Enrichment USA’s application for a license to build a centrifuge enrichment facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn. A notice published in the Federal Register on August 12 includes a commission order and an announcement of the opportunity to request a contested hearing.

The publication of the FR notice marked the start of a 60-day period in which a member of the public can file a request for a hearing. If contentions are adjudicated, the NRC intends to not hold a second, uncontested hearing before issuing a license on the $5 billion Project Ike Enrichment Facility, where Orano plans to reenrich depleted uranium hexafluoride (UF₆) tails and enrich natural-grade UF₆ to a maximum of 8-weight percent uranium-235.

As Kairos Power’s high-temperature, fluoride salt–cooled reactor facilities in Oak Ridge, Tenn., take shape, the company is partnering with multiple regional groups to prepare the local workforce for new nuclear career opportunities.

Kairos has signed a memorandum of understanding with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, the Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation (IACMI), Barnard Construction, Roane State Community College, Chattanooga State Community College, and Oak Ridge Schools to form the Nuclear Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Precast, or NuCAMP.

First American Nuclear Co., developer of the 240-MWe EAGL-1 reactor, has announced its intention to make its own advanced reactor fuel. The Indianapolis-based company has filed a regulatory engagement plan with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the construction of a Category II high-assay low-enriched uranium deconversion and fuel fabrication facility, and the NRC has docketed the plan for consideration.

Clean Core Thorium Energy announced that BWX Technologies–owned Kinectrics will conduct an independent technical review of its ANEEL (Advanced Nuclear Energy for Enriched Life) fuel qualification program.

According to CCTE, Kinectrics will review key aspects of the fuel design, manufacturing, safety, and regulatory readiness.

Using SLAC’s electron camera, researchers recorded timestamps of solid copper atoms (orange) as they melted (yellow) after being blasted with laser heat. This graphic shows how copper atoms changed over a period of several femtoseconds (millionths of a billionth of a second), notated here as fractions of a picosecond. Instead of the predicted collapse, the researchers saw a gradual melting. (Image: Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has announced researchers have conducted experiments testing how copper melts under extreme conditions, such as those it might be exposed to in a fusion machine. The results, published in Nature Communications, found that a copper thin film was more resilient to melting than models had predicted, uncovering molecular dynamics that had been missing from calculations.

“These results greatly improve the simulations we use to predict which materials have the best shot at surviving the extreme conditions of future fusion reaction chambers,” said Mianzhen Mo, the SLAC staff scientist who led the research.

The Spanish government has renewed for another three years the operating license of Almaraz nuclear power plant, the country’s largest power plant and a facility that was originally scheduled to shut down beginning next year as part of Spain’s plans to phase out nuclear energy.

The license renewal—issued on August 12 by the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge and posted publicly on August 14—extends the license of the two-unit, 2,017-MWe Almaraz through June 8, 2030.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued an environmental assessment and finding of no significant impact to Disa Technologies for company’s use of its NRC-licensed high-pressure slurry ablation (HPSA) technology to remediate abandoned uranium mine (AUM) waste at the Mary Ann AUM waste pile site in Montrose County, Colo.

Disa Tech, a Wyoming-based mineral processing company, submitted a premobilization notification to the NRC in March to use its HPSA technology at the Mary Ann site. The NRC is considering approval of the PMN, which would officially allow HPSA operations to proceed.

An artist's sketch and a cross-section view of the DIII-D tokamak. (Images: General Atomics)

At the DIII-D National Fusion Facility near San Diego, Calif., home to the largest operating tokamak in North America, researchers from Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility worked to develop a machine learning framework capable of adaptively predicting changes in a tokamak’s hardware.

The team’s research was recently published in the journal Machine Learning with Applications.

Plans between GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy and Blue Energy to build a “gas-plus-nuclear” power plant have advanced beyond a strategic collaboration, with an agreement now in place.

Researchers at Idaho National Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have conducted a three-dimensional study of irradiated U-10Zr—uranium alloyed with 10 percent zirconium—across key radial regions, providing new insights into how the material swells, transfers heat, and interacts with the fuel cladding.

U-10Zr was extensively tested in historical sodium-cooled fast reactors and is now attracting attention for use in next-generation advanced reactors.

Pacific Gas and Electric has received a federal credit payment of $271 million from the Department of Energy under the DOE’s Civil Nuclear Credit (CNC) Program, which was set up in 2022 as a $6 billion federal strategic investment to help preserve the existing U.S. nuclear reactor fleet. The Award Cycle 1 funds just disbursed cover extended operations for Diablo Canyon-1, with the DOE noting that Unit 2 will become eligible for a CNC payment after completion of the 2025 award year audit.

The two main players of the Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, X-energy and TerraPower, have both announced significant developments in their projects to deploy advanced commercial-scale reactors.

The global nuclear revival, which is fueled by unprecedented demand for firm, affordable, dispatchable power for artificial intelligence and data center build-out, energy security imperatives, and climate commitments, has exposed a structural reality of the Western fuel cycle: No single allied nation currently possesses the full suite of front-end capabilities. From mining through conversion, enrichment, fabrication, and the emerging deconversion and metallization steps required for reactor fuels, capability is distributed across Canada, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States (collectively, the “Sapporo Five”), as well as a small group of close partners.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have measured how diamond melts under extreme pressures, resolving a long-standing discrepancy between experiment and theory. In inertial confinement fusion experiments, where a diamond capsule is used to hold fuel, this refined understanding of diamond’s phase change has the potential to triple energy gain, provided that other degradation mechanisms can be controlled.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management reports that workers at the Hanford Site, near Richland, Wash., have performed a technically complex operation to remove a large legacy mixer pump from Tank SY-101 in the 200 West Area. The removal allows for the future installation of tank waste retrieval equipment as part of the next phase of waste cleanup at the site.

A short video on the Hanford Site’s YouTube channel shows aspects of the operation, including the pump being lifted out of the tank with a specially designed hydraulic lift system named Hercules.

Romania has taken its last operating reactor off line due to the record-low water levels of the Danube River, in what is the latest example of how the historic heat wave gripping Europe has impacted the river levels and water temperatures needed to operate nuclear power plants across the continent. The situation is not isolated to Romania, however, as power plants in Hungary and France are also facing challenges.

Results of a two-year study of groundwater levels at the site of the planned Environmental Management Disposal Facility (EMDF) in Oak Ridge, Tenn., have been released, revealing that the levels fell at a slower-than-expected rate. The collection of data on groundwater levels during two wet seasons, conducted by the Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management and the contractor United Cleanup Oak Ridge, formed the core of a groundwater field demonstration study which will help inform the final design of the EMDF landfill.

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.