Nuclear News

After hours of squabbling between left-wing and centrist Democrats, the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill (H.R. 3684)—one of the two main pillars of President Biden’s domestic agenda—passed the House of Representatives late Friday night and has been sent to the White House for signing. The final tally was 228–206, with 13 Republicans joining most Democrats in casting their votes in favor of the legislation.

Clifford

Lackey

Two student interns at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory looking for an easier way to monitor the acidity and phosphate concentrations of a process fluid like dissolved nuclear fuel have published research on a monitoring method that provides real-time data without the need for physical sampling of the substance. Their story was published on October 27 on PNNL’s website.

Student leaders: Hope Lackey conducted pH measurement and chemical analysis research during her Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) experience at PNNL in 2018 while she was working toward her undergraduate degree in environmental studies at the College of Idaho. Andrew Clifford, also a SULI intern and a student at the College of Idaho, partnered with Lackey between his junior and senior year, while studying for a dual bachelor’s in chemistry and math/physics.

Imagine it’s January 1998. A specially equipped train from the Department of Energy rolls up to the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) to pick up spent nuclear fuel and take it to the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada. This scene is repeated thousands of times at nuclear plant sites across the U.S. over the ensuing decades. The solution to permanent spent fuel disposal as outlined in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (and its amendments) is working as intended. The nation’s commercial spent fuel is safely isolated deep underground for the long term.

But that is not what happened. Work on Yucca Mountain has been stalled for a full decade, and the organization within the DOE that by law is responsible for managing the spent fuel program has been defunded and disbanded.

The construction of Unit 3 at the United Arab Emirates’ Barakah nuclear power plant has been completed, the Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation (ENEC) announced yesterday on the sidelines of COP26, the high-profile climate confab taking place in Scotland this week and next.

According to ENEC’s announcement, Barakah-3 will now undergo operational readiness activities and is on track to start up in 2023.

As Congress awaited key votes yesterday on spending bills that include production tax credits for at-risk plants and a new amendment adding $500 million in supplemental funding over five years to increase the availability of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a Full Committee Hearing On Potential Non-Electric Applications Of Civilian Nuclear Energy. Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.V.), chairman of the committee, emphasized that “advanced nuclear reactors hold enormous potential to provide opportunity to communities across the country with zero-emission baseload power” and made it clear he expects new reactors to replace retiring coal plants in his home state of West Virginia.

Speaking before the committee were Shannon Bragg-Sitton of Idaho National Laboratory, Paul Chodak III of American Electric Power, and Michael J. Guastella of the Council of Radionuclides and Radiopharmaceuticals.

X-energy and Centrus Energy Corporation yesterday announced the completion of the preliminary design for X-energy’s TRISO-X Fuel Fabrication Facility, plus the signing of a contract for Centrus to continue its work as the project enters its next phase.

Crane

Exelon, owner and operator of the nation’s largest nuclear reactor fleet, has made clear its position on the massive infrastructure and social spending bills that federal lawmakers, at this writing, continue to haggle over.

“As world leaders convene in Glasgow for COP26 to address the climate crisis, the need for America to take action has never been more urgent,” said Chris Crane, Exelon’s president and chief executive officer, on Monday. “The bipartisan infrastructure agreement and the policy framework for Build Back Better legislation will make us more competitive globally, spur innovation and support good-paying jobs, protect current and future generations from the worst impacts of climate change, and cement America’s leadership on one of the most pressing challenges—and opportunities—of our time. The time to act is now, and we encourage lawmakers to pass these critical policies into law.”

On the sidelines of the COP26 Conference in Glasgow yesterday, John Kerry, the Biden’s administration’s special presidential envoy for climate, joined Romanian president Klaus Iohannis to announce plans to build a first-of-a-kind small modular reactor plant in Romania. The SMR technology is to be provided by NuScale Power, based in Portland, Ore.

For U.S. nuclear plants now undergoing decommissioning and those about to begin the process, environmental remediation has remained relatively consistent on the nuclear side with respect to contaminated soil and groundwater cleanup. However, non-­radiological chemical remediation has been shifting as new and emerging compounds are getting attention from the public and from the Environmental Protection Agency and state agencies.

Here is a recap of industry happenings over the course of the past month:

ADVANCED REACTORS MARKETPLACE

Terrestrial Energy and Cameco examine partnership for deploying IMSR Generation IV nuclear power plants

• Terrestrial Energy and Cameco Corporation have signed a non-binding and non-exclusive memorandum of understanding to examine potential partnership opportunities to deploy Terrestrial Energy’s Integrated Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR) Generation IV nuclear power plants in North America and worldwide. The partnership would also evaluate possible opportunities for the supply of uranium, fuel, and other services. As part of these activities, the companies are investigating the potential of Cameco’s Port Hope uranium conversion facility in Ontario, Canada, for IMSR fuel salt supply.

The STP Nuclear Operating Company operates the South Texas Project Electric Generating Station, located eight miles west of Wadsworth, Texas. One of STP’s core values is innovation—a value that is evident in the organization’s 2021 Nuclear Energy Institute Top Innovative Practice (TIP) award–winning mobile work management (MWM) platform, which strives to utilize technology to bring efficiency to the field for nuclear professionals.

A new funding model has been introduced by the U.K. government to attract a wider range of private investment into new nuclear power projects, cutting the cost of financing them and reducing the cost to consumers.

The Nuclear Energy (Financing) Bill, announced by the government on October 26, will use a model known as the Regulated Asset Base (RAB) to fund future nuclear power plants in Britain. The model is tried and tested, according to the government, and has successfully financed other infrastructure projects, such as the U.K.’s Thames Tideway Tunnel and Heathrow Terminal 5.

Learn more about the RAB model.

Idaho National Laboratory recently released footage of a new experiment at its Transient Reactor Test Facility (TREAT) that simulates what happens to a nuclear fuel pin when it starts to overheat. Go to Twitter for the original post, or cut to the chase and watch a 14-second clip on YouTube.

Probabilistic risk assessment has been around for over 40 years, helping us understand the amazing, complex engineering systems we design, build, and operate. It’s a powerful tool, but the time has come to consider how we can modernize it. There are important gaps in PRA, including in areas such as human reliability, dynamics, natural hazards, and cybersecurity. However, there are three things that are even more important to do:

Steven P. Nesbit

Depending on where you reside on this nuclear technology world of ours, you may care a great deal, or not at all, about who happens to be sitting on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at any given point in time. If you live on the Department of Energy continent or the Academia continent, it’s probably not a big deal. If you are on the Nuclear Power Plant Operator continent or the Vendor continent (which are actually part of the same landmass), it is quite important. If you are on the NRC island, it’s huge.

The NRC comprises five presidentially appointed, U.S. Senate–confirmed commissioners who are commonly referred to as “the Commission,” and approximately 3,000 federal employees referred to as the staff. The Commission oversees the NRC staff; together, they license and regulate the nation’s civilian use of radioactive materials to provide reasonable assurance of adequate protection of public health and safety. The president of the United States designates one of the commissioners to serve as chairman, the principal executive officer of and the official spokesperson for the agency.

“The price of anti-nuclear psychosis (for that is what it is) will be paid by vulnerable countries and future generations who suffer the escalating damages of climate breakdown,” writes environmentalist and author Mark Lynas in the foreword to a new study, One Billion Tons: CO₂ Reductions and a Faster Coal Exit in Germany. “This report puts numbers on this price to be paid for the first time—a nice round number of a billion tons.”

According to Lynas, the billion tons is the “opportunity cost” of the German government’s plan to shutter its remaining nuclear power plants by 2022 while keeping its coal plants going until 2038. (Three of those plants, Brokdorf, Grohnde, and Gundremmingen, are scheduled to close later this year.)

A new survey by the research and consulting firm BVA Group for France’s Orano finds an increased acceptance of nuclear energy among the French people from two years ago. (BVA conducted a similar poll for the nuclear fuel cycle company in 2019.)

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Pennsylvania State University have demonstrated that a natural protein found bonded to rare earth elements can be recovered and used as a tool to purify and effectively manage radioactive metals that show promise for cancer therapy and the detection of illicit nuclear activities.

In what has become for nuclear advocates an all-too-familiar refrain, Georgia Power has made another revision to the Vogtle nuclear expansion project schedule. The company now predicts a Unit 3 in-service date in the third quarter of 2022 and a Unit 4 in-service date in the second quarter of 2023, representing a three-month shift for each unit.

The Department of the Air Force has selected Eielson Air Force Base as the site of a stationary microreactor that “will provide the installation with a clean, reliable, and resilient nuclear energy supply technology for critical national security infrastructure,” the department announced on October 15.