Nuclear News

Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.

Utah-based waste management company EnergySolutions announced that it has signed a memorandum of understating with the Intermountain Power Agency and the state of Utah to explore the development of advanced nuclear power generation at the Intermountain Power Project (IPP) site near Delta, Utah.

Advanced nuclear company Oklo Inc. has new leadership for its board of directors as billionaire Sam Altman is stepping down from the position he has held since 2015. The move is meant to open new partnership opportunities with OpenAI, where Altman is CEO, and other artificial intelligence companies.

Pacific Fusion has a staff that knows its way around pulsers and inertial fusion, and an ongoing collaboration with General Atomics. Today, the two companies are announcing plans to test Pacific Fusion’s pulser-driven inertial fusion energy concept, with commercial fusion power as the goal.

“We are building a fusion machine and testing all equipment—including components and a pulser module—at our Pacific Fusion test center,” Pacific Fusion cofounder and chief technology officer Keith LeChien told Nuclear News. “GA’s engineering expertise remains an important part of our progress, and we expect this collaboration to continue through future phases of development.”

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Nuclear Plasma and Radiation Engineering (NPRE) Department announced yesterday that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved a fuel qualification methodology topical report for the high-temperature gas-cooled reactor the university wants to construct. The topical report was prepared by Ultra Safe Nuclear and submitted by UIUC to the NRC in March 2024. It describes the fuel that would be used in the microreactor that UIUC plans to host—initially containing uranium enriched to 9.9 percent U-235—and how it would be tested. The NRC issued its approval and a final safety evaluation on April 1.

Framatome announced that it has inaugurated a new workshop dedicated to the fabrication of fuel for research reactors and targets for medical isotopes at the company’s Romans-sur-Isère site in France. The workshops are part of Framatome’s CERCA division, which manufactures fuel and irradiation targets for research reactors.

ANS President Lisa Marshall recently sat down with Phil Zeringue, vice president of strategic partnerships at Nuclearn.ai to talk about the evolving state of education in the nuclear world.

Lawmakers are crossing the aisle to back proposals to expand nuclear power and nuclear research in the Badger State, especially as energy-hungry data center projects advance in Wisconsin and projections for energy demand soar.

The state has a goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 but will also need to generate more power to support data center plans, such as those being discussed in Port Washington and Beaver Dam, according to media reports.

The Department of Energy’s Hanford Field Office and Washington State Department of Ecology (Ecology) will hold a virtual public meeting on April 30 to learn more about the siting, construction, and operation of a proposed Contact-Handled Waste Processing Treatment and Storage Area at the DOE’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash.

Los Alamos National Laboratory recently performed a series of customized criticality experiments to obtain data that will support the transportation of HALEU TRISO fuel, the Department of Energy announced April 21.

Nearly 60 percent of staff at the U.S. Department of Energy’s nuclear-friendly Loan Programs Office may be lost through President Trump’s deferred resignation program, the Washington Examiner reported.

According to the news outlet, 123 of the 210 current LPO employees have opted into the retirement buyout, which would amount to a 58.5 percent staffing cut in the office that helps finance new nuclear projects among other energy proposals. There is a 45-day period for federal employees older than 40 to change their minds, which could impact the final number of exiting staff.

Bipartisan legislation introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this month seeks to close a loophole that currently allows medical patients to be unintentionally exposed to radiation without reporting or disclosure. The Nuclear Medicine Clarification Act of 2025 (H.R. 2541) was introduced into the House by Reps. Don Davis (D., N.C.), Morgan Griffith (R., Va.), and Ben Cline (R., Va.), who said the legislation would improve care and ensure transparency for patients and simplify federal rules coming from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

A recent American Nuclear Society webinar laid the basic groundwork in understanding radiation and the risks it presents. Robert Hayes, an associate professor of nuclear engineering at North Carolina State University and joint faculty member at Savannah River National Laboratory, presented “Radiological Risk in Perspective,” the latest online event in ANS’s Educator Training offerings.

In a Q&A posted on TVA’s website last week about a “new nuclear heyday,” Bob Deacy shared his vision for the Clinch River nuclear site in Oak Ridge, Tenn.—and some news about next steps for the company’s small modular reactor plans.

The Tennessee Valley Authority’s senior vice president for the Clinch River project, Deacy described his vision for up to four SMRs built on plots smaller than a football field with state-of-the-art digital equipment and a newly trained workforce providing reliable 24/7 power to the grid.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced it has awarded a contract worth nearly $153 million to North Wind Dynamics for infrastructure support services at the DOE’s Paducah Site in Kentucky. According to DOE-EM, the company, a small business based in Idaho Falls, Idaho, was chosen based on “key personnel, organization, and management approach, past performance, and value to taxpayers.”

Inertial fusion energy (IFE) developer Pacific Fusion, based in Fremont, Calif., announced this morning that it is on target to achieve net facility gain—more fusion energy out than all energy stored in the system—with a demonstration system by 2030, and backs the claim with a technical paper published yesterday on arXiv: “Affordable, manageable, practical, and scalable (AMPS) high-yield and high-gain inertial fusion.”

James Conca

Nuclear is—period. But don’t take my word for it: ask the United Nations. The 2021 report Life Cycle Assessment of Electricity Generation Options, by the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), shows that nuclear has the lowest overall impacts on human health and the environment, by any measure and from any perspective.

In his 1938 article “Economics in Eight Words,” Walter Morrow really hit the nail on the head when he quipped, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Although he was referring to the olden days when saloons offered free lunches only if you bought alcoholic drinks, it is perfectly suited to the energy industry.

New ultrasonic testing equipment being used by the Department of Energy’s Idaho Cleanup Project (ICP) to confirm the integrity of thousands of legacy waste drums is saving taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management announced.

The technology allows ICP personnel to inspect the thickness transuranic waste drums held in storage at the DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory Site, ensuring they meet Department of Transportation minimum thickness requirements to be shipped for disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. According to DOE-EM, if drums meet the DOT thickness requirements, they can be loaded directly into shipping casks without the need for an expensive overpack container, leading to a minimum cost savings of $26 million.

BWX Technologies Inc. has purchased about 97 acres of land in an Oak Ridge, Tenn., industrial park where the company expects to build a uranium enrichment facility using a technology called DUECE, or, Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment. DUECE was developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to provide enriched uranium for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, and BWXT is several months into a yearlong engineering study to evaluate options for deploying a centrifuge pilot plant using DUECE.

Seattle-based TerraPower signaled its interest this week in building its Natrium small modular reactor in the United Kingdom, the company announced.

TerraPower sent a letter to the U.K.’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, formally establishing its intention to enter the U.K. generic design assessment (GDA) process. This is TerraPower’s first step in deployment of its Natrium technology—a 345-MW sodium fast reactor coupled with a molten salt energy storage unit—on the international stage.