Nuclear News

Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org

For the past few years, I have been conducting a thoroughly unscientific, one-question poll of nuclear utility and supplier CEOs and senior executives: “What keeps you up at night?” The number one answer is—and has been from the beginning—“Workforce.”

The ongoing shortage of skilled labor—welders, pipefitters, electricians, and the like—almost always gets top billing in nuclear workforce discussions. In April 2025, the U.S. had an eye-popping 600,000 unfilled positions in the construction and manufacturing sectors. This consistent supply gap feeds a continuing talent war that has pushed craft wages up 20 percent since the end of the COVID pandemic, straining project budgets and profit margins alike.

Perhaps the most underappreciated gap in the nuclear workforce is professional and business services. It is the second-largest employment category in the nuclear industry, according to the Department of Energy’s 2024 U.S. Energy & Employment Report.

Uranium provider Cameco has calculated an end-of-July spot price for uranium of $71.10—a decline from the $78.50 of the previous month. Cameco lists a long-term price of $81.00 for July, which is the same price that was listed in January. From February to June, the long-term price was $80.00.

Uranium futures were about $71.45 per pound on August 4, according to online analysis firm Trading Economics, which noted that continued prices near $71.50 are maintaining the price drop from the seven-month high of $79.00 in mid-June. The relatively low prices are related to a lack of buying from holding funds, which have received lowered bids from utilities. Nevertheless, uranium prices are higher at this point, compared with the $63.70 price in mid-March this year.

Nieh

President Trump recently nominated Ho Nieh for the role of commissioner at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission through the remainder of a term that will expire June 30, 2029.

Nieh has been the vice president of regulatory affairs at Southern Nuclear since 2021, though he is currently working as a loaned executive at the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, where he has been for more than a year.

Nieh’s experience: Nieh started his career at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, where he worked primarily as a nuclear plant engineer and contributed as a civilian instructor in the U.S. Navy’s Nuclear Power Program.

From there, he joined the NRC in 1997 as a project engineer. In more than 19 years of service at the organization, he served in a variety of key leadership roles, including division director of Reactor Projects, division director of Inspection and Regional Support, and director of the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced it has signed a lease with General Matter for the reuse of a 100-acre parcel of federal land at the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky for a new private-sector domestic uranium enrichment facility.

Thorcon International has received official approval from BAPETEN, Indonesia’s nuclear regulator, for a site evaluation plan and site evaluation management system plan for the country’s Kelasa location. According to Thorcon, it is the first-ever nuclear power plant–related licensing approval from the Indonesian government, and it marks the completion of the first step of the company’s nuclear power plant licensing campaign in the country.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has sent a confirmatory order to Constellation Energy Generation outlining the agreed-on actions to address apparent violations of agency requirements at Quad Cities nuclear power plant in Cordova, Ill. The corrective and preventive actions are based on a June neutral party–mediated alternative dispute resolution (ADR) session that had been requested by Constellation to help it and the agency decide on steps forward.

The news is abuzz with recent stories about four radioactive wasp nests found at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The site has been undergoing cleanup operations since the 1990s related to the production of plutonium and tritium for defense purposes during the Cold War. Cleanup activities are expected to continue into the 2060s.

The Chicago suburb of Oak Brook, Ill., will be the home of Nano Nuclear Energy’s regional demonstration and office facility to support development of the company’s Kronos micro modular reactor (MMR). The company recently purchased for $3.5 million a 2.75-acre parcel that includes land and a 23,537-square-foot standalone building with a 7,400-square-foot nonnuclear demonstration area.

One of the more pivotal issues in facilitating the use of radiation sources—including nuclear power—in the United States (and most of the Western world) is concern about the health effects of low levels of radiation. The current regulatory assumption is that every additional increment of radiation linearly increases the risk of cancer.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright will attend the opening of the Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative in Aiken, S.C., on August 7. Wright will deliver remarks and join Savannah River National Laboratory leadership and partners for a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

The dust has settled: It’s been one month since President Trump signed H.R.1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, after a lengthy and contentious reconciliation process. As drafts of the bill evolved through committees, the House, and the Senate, the fate of federal support for nuclear energy projects was often obfuscated.

Fabrication of the reactor core for the 1.5-MW Project Pele demonstration microreactor has begun, according to BWX Technologies. Pele is being developed at the BWXT Innovation Campus in Lynchburg, Va., for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Strategic Capabilities Office.

Chris Wagner has more than 40 years of experience in nuclear medicine, beginning as a clinical practitioner before moving into leadership roles at companies like Mallinckrodt (now Curium) and Nordion. His knowledge of both the clinical and the manufacturing sides of nuclear medicine laid the groundwork for helping to found Eden Radioisotopes, a start-up venture that intends to make diagnostic and therapeutic raw material medical isotopes like molybdenum-99 and lutetium-177.

Lightbridge Corporation has fabricated samples of nuclear fuel materials made of an enriched uranium-zirconium alloy, matching the composition of the alloy that the company intends to use for its future commercial Lightbridge Fuel product. The fuel is designed to improve the performance, safety, and proliferation resistance of nuclear reactors, according to the company. The enriched coupon samples will now be placed into capsules for irradiation testing in Idaho National Laboratory’s Advanced Test Reactor.

The world’s first nuclear-powered merchant ship, the NS Savannah, will have a public site visit in Baltimore, Md., on Saturday, August 23.

To register for the event and find up-to-date details on the event’s address, time, and more, click here.

This year’s ANS-sponsored Nuclear Criticality Safety Division Conference (NCSD 2025) will be held at the AT&T Hotel & Conference Center in Austin, Texas, September 14–18.

To register for the event, explore the full program, and reserve your room at the host hotel, click here.

A report just released by Idaho National Laboratory reviews decades of radiation protection standards and research on the health effects of low-dose radiation and recommends that the current U.S. annual occupational dose limit of 5,000 mrem be maintained without applying ALARA—the “as low as reasonably achievable” regulatory concept first introduced in 1971—below that threshold.

Noting that epidemiological studies “have consistently failed to demonstrate statistically significant health effects at doses below 10,000 mrem delivered at low dose rates,” the report also recommends “future consideration of increasing this limit to 10,000 mrem/year with appropriate cumulative-dose constraints.”

Caputo

Commissioner Annie Caputo is resigning from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, according to a statement sent out to staff on Tuesday morning. Her resignation comes one day after the U.S. Senate voted to reconfirm chair David Wright to the commission.

“The time has come for me to more fully focus on my family,” Caputo said in her statement, provided by NRC spokesperson Scott Burnell. “I believe the [Trump] administration’s recent executive orders and the bipartisan ADVANCE Act have given the agency a platform for change.”

Mauritius Hiller

The nuclear industry is being pushed forward by a global tailwind that includes plans for more conventional nuclear plants and an exciting trend toward developing small modular reactors. These include advanced safety features and novel reactor designs, often powered by new types of fuel.

This new technology must meet existing stringent safety and security demands and must be safe for the environment, workers, and general population. Wide acceptance of international standards, as well as standardization of designs and plant concepts, will help in the long run.

Radiation protection (RP) professionals play a key role from the very start of the design phase. There is rapid and continuous development in the field of RP. Improved computational tools enable better modeling and understanding of radiation shielding, detection, and effects. Nuclear safeguards and nuclear criticality safety are increasingly important.

Munn

Nuclear engineer and longtime ANS member Wanda Munn died on July 23 at the age of 93. Described as a “trailblazer for women [and] an outspoken advocate for the peaceful use of nuclear technology” in her Tri-City (Wash.) Herald obituary, Munn followed a unique path to her nuclear engineering career. She did not get her degree until she was 46, and she subsequently spent 18 years working on systems design, construction, and operation of the Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF) reactor for Westinghouse at the Hanford nuclear site in eastern Washington state.

Nontraditional student: Munn was born in 1931. She graduated high school early, at age 16, and started to pursue a medical degree. However, those plans changed when she married at age 18. By her early 40s, she was divorced and working as a secretary in a university nuclear engineering department when she decided to return to school to get a nuclear engineering degree.