Nuclear News

A new career guide for the nuclear energy industry is now available: The Nuclear Empowered Workforce by Earnestine Johnson. Drawing on more than 30 years of experience across 16 nuclear facilities, Johnson offers a practical, insightful look into some of the many career paths available in commercial nuclear power. To mark the release, Johnson sat down with Nuclear News for a wide-ranging conversation about her career, her motivation for writing the book, and her advice for the next generation of nuclear professionals.

When Johnson began her career at engineering services company Stone & Webster, she entered a field still reeling from the effects of the Three Mile Island incident in 1979, nearly 15 years earlier. Her hiring cohort was the first group of new engineering graduates the company had brought on since TMI, a reflection of the industry-wide pause in nuclear construction. Her first long-term assignment—at the Millstone site in Waterford, Conn., helping resolve design issues stemming from TMI—marked the beginning of a long and varied career that spanned positions across the country.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will hold a two-day public workshop September 30–October 1 to discuss efforts to improve realism in probabilistic risk assessment. The hybrid workshop, which will be held in person and online, will focus on enhancing risk-informed decision-making for nuclear power plants by making PRA models more realistic and reflective of reactor design, operations, and real-world behavior.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management said the Idaho Cleanup Project (ICP) has recycled more than 2,100 tons of noncontaminated metal debris since 2022 as it works to demolish three legacy Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program prototypes at the Idaho National Laboratory Site, saving taxpayers nearly $2 million in disposal costs while advancing the project’s environmental goals.

Kansas is now one of 11 U.S. states and territories that are free of cesium-137 irradiators—the others being Alaska, Arizona, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, Puerto Rico, South Dakota, and Wyoming. The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration announced on September 10 that it had completed the removal of all of these medical devices from Kansas as part of its ongoing effort to reduce radiological threats in the United States.

The Department of Energy announced on Wednesday that it has awarded $134 million in funding for two programs designed to secure U.S. leadership in emerging fusion technologies and innovation. The funding was awarded through the DOE’s Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) program in the Office of Science and will support the next round of Fusion Innovation Research Engine (FIRE) collaboratives and the Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE) awards.

As interest and investment grows around AI applications in nuclear power plants, there remains a gap in standardized benchmarks that can quantitatively compare and measure the quality and reliability of new products.

Nuclear-tailored AI developer Atomic Canyon is moving to fill that gap by entering into a new strategic partnership with Idaho National Laboratory to develop and release the “first comprehensive benchmark suite for evaluating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and large language models (LLMs) in nuclear applications.”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued a statement on September 9 denying reports that the Department of Energy plans to terminate the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WTP) at the Hanford Site in Washington state.

Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org

This month, September 8–11, the American Nuclear Society is teaming up with the Nuclear Energy Institute to host our first-ever Nuclear Energy Conference and Expo—NECX for short—in Atlanta. This new meeting combines ANS’s Utility Working Conference and NEI’s Nuclear Energy Assembly to form what NEI CEO Maria Korsnick and I hope will be the premier nuclear industry gathering in America.

We did this because after more than four decades of relative stagnation, the U.S. nuclear supply chain is finally entering a new era of dynamic growth. This resurgence is being driven by several powerful and increasingly durable forces: the explosive demand for electricity from artificial intelligence and data centers, an unprecedented wave of public and private acceptance of—and investment in—advanced nuclear technologies, and a strong market signal for reliable, on-demand power. Add the recent Trump administration executive orders on nuclear into the mix, and you have all the makings of an accelerant-rich business environment primed for rapid expansion.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently announced that David Wright, after being nominated by President Trump and confirmed by the Senate, was ceremonially sworn in as NRC chair on September 8.

This swearing in comes more than a month after Wright began his third term on the commission; he began leading as chair July 31. His term will conclude on June 30, 2030.

New York City–based advanced nuclear technology developer Nano Nuclear Energy has been awarded a Direct-to-Phase II Small Business Innovation Research contract for its Kronos micro modular reactor (MMR) by AFWERX, the innovation and venture arm of the U.S. Air Force. The contract calls for AFWERX, with the 11th Civil Engineering Squadron, to explore the feasibility of deploying the Kronos MMR Energy System at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling (JBAB) in Washington, D.C.

Texas Tech University and Fermi America are now one step closer to realizing their massive vision for the Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus in Amarillo, Texas, as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has accepted the first two parts of its combined license application (COLA) for four Westinghouse AP1000s.

Nuclearn, the nuclear AI start-up cofounded by Bradely Fox, one of Nuclear News’s 40 Under 40 honorees for 2024, announced it has raised $10.5 million in Series A funding to accelerate product development and market expansion of its AI platform for nuclear plant operations.

The application period for the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship Program (MSCFP) has opened. Women interested in studying nuclear-related subjects at the master’s degree level should apply by October 31, 2025.

More information on how to apply can be found here.

As part of its environmental review of Global Laser Enrichment’s planned Paducah Laser Enrichment Facility (PLEF) in Kentucky, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it will conduct a scoping process ahead of preparing an environmental impact statement for GLE’s license application. Announced in the September 5 Federal Register, the NRC is seeking written comments on the scope of the EIS until October 6.

Since the Department of Energy kicked off a 10-company race with its Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program to bring test reactors on line by July 4, 2026, the industry has been waiting for new headlines proclaiming progress. Aalo Atomics broke ahead of the pack first by announcing last week that it had broken ground on its 10-MWe Aalo-X at Idaho National Laboratory.

Hash Hashemian
president@ans.org

Last month, I talked about my goal of strengthening ANS’s voice, in part by attending three conferences. I have now checked the first event off that list: the Nuclear Opportunities Workshop.

This year, NOW took another step in outgrowing its “workshop” moniker and transitioning to a full-fledged regional conference and expo. What started only a few years ago as a small gathering in Oak Ridge, Tenn., with roughly 50 attendees has skyrocketed to an event with 1,100 people in attendance in Knoxville.

NOW’s popularity reflected how busy the roughly 350 nuclear companies in Tennessee have been in recent years. There is significant work going on surrounding Gen IV reactor development and deployment, advancements in new nuclear fuels, and defense-related builds like the Uranium Processing Facility.

David Garcia

If ComEd’s Zion plant in northern Illinois hadn’t closed in 1998, David Garcia might still be there, where he got his start in nuclear power as an operator at age 24.

But in his ninth year working there, Zion closed, and Garcia moved on to a series of new roles—including at Wisconsin’s Point Beach plant, the corporate offices of Minnesota’s Xcel Energy, and on the supplier side at PaR Nuclear—into an on-the-job education that he augmented with degrees in business and divinity that he sought later in life.

Garcia started his own company—Waymaker Resource Group—in 2014. Recently, Waymaker has been supporting Holtec’s restart project at the Palisades plant with staffing and analysis. Palisades sits almost exactly due east of the fully decommissioned Zion site on the other side of Lake Michigan and is poised to operate again after what amounts to an extended outage of more than three years. Holtec also plans to build more reactors at the same site.

For Garcia, the takeaway is clear: “This industry is not going away. Nuclear power and the adjacent industries that support nuclear power—and clean energy, period—are going to be needed for decades upon decades.”

In July, Garcia talked with Nuclear News staff writer Susan Gallier about his career and what he has learned about running successful outages and other projects.

The Department of Energy announced recently it will provide more than $35 million for 42 projects to help move emerging energy technologies from DOE national laboratories, plants, and sites related to grid security, artificial intelligence, nuclear energy, and advanced manufacturing to the marketplace. The selected projects will leverage over $21 million in cost-share from private and public partners, bringing total funding to more than $57.5 million.

A full list of the FY2025 selections is available here.

Flowserve Corporation, headquartered in Irving, Texas, has “received official approval from the U.S. Department of Energy (10 CFR Part 810) to be able to manufacture safety-critical pumps for India’s new reactors at our Coimbatore, India facility,” according to a post on the company’s LinkedIn profile.

Rhoades

Mudrick

Longtime nuclear industry executive Chris Mudrick has been named the new chief nuclear officer at Constellation Energy, effective September 29. He will take over the position from Dave Rhoades, who is retiring from the role.

History: Mudrick has been Constellation’s senior vice president of generation growth since December 2024, a position that marked his return to the company after serving as executive vice president and CNO at Bruce Power in Ontario, Canada, for more than four years. Prior to joining Bruce Power, Mudrick was at Constellation/Exelon for more than 32 years, ending his time there as senior vice president of operations–East and chief operating officer. He began his career with the company as a nuclear power plant operator in Pennsylvania in 1987.