Nuclear News

The Maine Maritime Academy (MMA) is set to become the first maritime academy in the United States to offer a major in nuclear engineering technology. The college characterized it as “an important step in addressing workforce needs and advancing clean energy solutions” in a LinkedIn post announcing the major.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced the completion of a set of experiments measuring the viscosity and thermal conductivity of several uranium-bearing molten salts, filling in gaps that could help with the development of molten salt reactors.

The noticeable exuberance within the nuclear community as a whole appears to have spilled over into the waste management sphere as well, judging from the 2026 Waste Management Conference, held March 8–12 in Phoenix, Ariz., and sponsored by Waste Management Symposia.

The theme of this year’s conference was “Efficient and Innovative Nuclear Materials and Technology Solutions,” and many of the scheduled panels and technical sessions revolved around how nuclear growth and technological advancements are affecting the back end of the fuel cycle, as well as how the cleanup of legacy sites is enabling new nuclear development.

NextEra Energy is set to acquire Dominion Energy, the two utilities announced earlier today in an approximately $67 billion merger that will alter the energy landscape—including for nuclear power—in the United States.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has received concurrence from regulators that Tank 14 at the Savannah River Site has reached preliminary cease waste removal (PCWR) status after radioactive liquid waste was successfully removed from the tank. PCWR is a regulatory milestone in the closure of SRS’s old-style waste tanks, which were built in the 1950s to store waste generated by the chemical separations of plutonium and uranium.

The University of Missouri’s President’s Distinguished Lecture Series featured a talk by William D. Magwood IV, director general of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency and a former NRC commissioner, on May 13 at the Columbia campus’s Bond Life Sciences Center. Magwood speech was titled “The Next Nuclear Energy Era: Opportunities and Challenges.”

Lawmakers in Congress have introduced a pair of bills this month targeting different aspects of nuclear construction, with one proposal focusing on construction material and the other on tax credits.

For 45 years, Duane Arnold Energy Center operated in Linn County, Ia., near the town of Palo and just northwest of Cedar Rapids. The facility, owned by NextEra Energy, was the only nuclear power plant in the state.

In August 2020, a historic derecho swept across eastern Iowa with winds approaching 140 miles per hour. Damage to the plant’s cooling towers accelerated a shutdown that had already been planned, and the facility entered decommissioning soon after, with its fuel removed in October of that year. Iowa’s only nuclear plant had gone off line.

Today the national energy landscape looks very different than it did just six short years ago. Electricity demand is rising rapidly as data centers, artificial intelligence infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, and electrification expand across the country. Reliable, carbon-free baseload power has become increasingly valuable. In that context, Linn County has approved the rezoning necessary to support the recommissioning and restart of Duane Arnold and is actively supporting NextEra’s efforts to secure the remaining state and federal approvals.

The project team for the world’s largest operational tokamak, JT-60SA, has announced that it is getting ready to resume operations. The machine has been undergoing upgrades since 2024, with testing of newly installed equipment occurring since February 27.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will hold a regulatory conference Tuesday, May 19, with Vistra Operations Company officials to discuss a preliminary “white” safety finding at Comanche Peak-2.

Eight companies will collectively receive more than $94 million in cost-share funding to expedite the near-term deployment of small light water modular reactors, the Department of Energy announced Thursday.

Indianapolis-based reactor development start-up First American Nuclear (FANCO) announced on May 13 that it has entered into a strategic alliance with Montreal-based nuclear engineering company AtkinsRéalis.

Together, the companies now plan to jointly develop, test, and license FANCO’s EAGL-1 reactor design. For FANCO, the agreement comes as a chance to bring in a partner with decades of experience in nuclear project development. For AtkinsRéalis, the partnership provides the opportunity to establish a presence in Indiana.

Utah State University and Battelle Energy Alliance, an Idaho National Laboratory contractor, have signed a memorandum of understanding, committing to a Strategic Understanding for Premier Education and Research (SUPER) agreement, which formalizes and expands the university’s collaboration with INL.

Last month, all five commissioners of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission went before the U.S. House Committee on Energy & Commerce’s Energy Subcommittee to discuss the agency’s fiscal year 2027 budget and share priorities and activities key to the agency.

On Wednesday, the five took the NRC’s $892.3 million budget request for FY 2027 to the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, where the focus shifted more toward the attrition of NRC employees and attempts to recruit and retain.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced that its Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) is setting a new benchmark in cleanup progress at the Tennessee nuclear site—conducting demolition of two former Manhattan Project–era uranium enrichment facilities in a single year.

This week, the United States and South Korea have taken two steps toward deepening their nuclear partnership through two notable announcements. First, the majority-state owned Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power signed a memorandum of understanding with Birmingham, Ala.–based Southern Nuclear.

In a first quarter earnings call Monday, executives at Constellation said they should know in June or July the status of a request to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to transfer capacity interconnection rights from the company’s Eddystone gas- and-oil-powered plant in Pennsylvania to Crane nuclear power plant (formerly Three Mile Island-1).

Advanced Decommissioning Partners, a joint venture of NorthStar Group Services and Orano USA, is set to complete major decommissioning activities at Crystal River-3 nuclear power plant in Florida this summer, according to the license termination plan (LTP) the company submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The Department of Transportation has announced an initiative to develop small modular reactors for commercial shipping. The U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD) has launched a request for information (RFI) seeking industry input on the development of “a U.S.-built scalable, repeatable, commercially viable, system-centric, small modular reactor and their deployment within the marine transportation system.”

Originally scheduled for shutdown in 2025, Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant was given at least a few more years of life when in 2022, California lawmakers approved an extension of operations into 2030. The Avila Beach, Calif., plant already has the OK from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to operate into 2044 and 2045 after the two reactors’ operating licenses were renewed and extended for another 20 years, but state lawmakers still must approve any further extension beyond 2030 if the plant is to remain in operation.