A 3D model shows areas of West Valley's main plant process building demolition project that have been completed in yellow. Workers have removed 52 of the building’s 56 cells since the start of the demolition in September 2022.(Image: DOE)
The KIF document is meant to engage the reader to share, imagine, and renew nuclear waste information. (Photo: Per Wistbo Nibell)
The preservation of records, knowledge, and memory is recognized as an important component of nuclear waste management, preventing future generations from unnecessary interference with a waste repository and supporting future societies to make informed decisions about such sites.
The DOE designed the Atlas railcar to eventually ship spent nuclear fuel to consolidated storage. Before it begins shipping fuel, the department wants to demonstrate the safety of transportation casks through its Package Performance Demonstration project. (Photo: DOE)
Inspired by a history of similar testing endeavors and recommended by the National Academy of Sciences and the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, the Department of Energy is planning to conduct physical demonstrations on rail-sized spent nuclear fuel transportation casks. As part of the project, called the Spent Nuclear Fuel Package Performance Demonstration (PPD), the DOE is considering a number of demonstrations based on regulatory tests and realistic transportation scenarios, including collisions, drops, exposure to fire, and immersion in water.
HEPA filters located within the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System facility at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. (Photo: DOE)
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced that it has completed the commissioning of a new, nearly $500 million, large-scale ventilation system at its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the DOE’s geologic repository for defense-related transuranic waste in New Mexico.
The DOE’s Joel Bradburne speaks to attendees of the Energy, Technology & Environmental Business Association’s Business Opportunities Exchange. (Photo: DOE)
Cleanup progress at the former Portsmouth and Paducah uranium enrichment plants is helping enable new opportunities for local communities to continue advancing U.S. energy and U.S. security goals, according to Joel Bradburne, manager of the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Paducah Project Office (PPPO).
The U.S. Supreme Court. Front row, from left: Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., and Associate Justice Elena Kagan. Back row, from left: Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Associate Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, Associate Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. (Photo: Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States)
The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing of Interim Storage Partners’ consolidated interim storage facility in Andrews County, Texas. Both the NRC and ISP petitioned the Supreme Court to review a decision by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that invalidated the NRC-granted license for the facility. Those two cases were consolidated into one, NRC v. Texas, which was heard by the court.
Concept art of Moltex’s SSR–W and WATSS facility. (Image: Moltex)
Advanced reactor company Moltex Energy Canada said it has successfully validated its waste to stable salt (WATSS) process on used nuclear fuel bundles from an unnamed Canadian commercial reactor through hot cell experiments conducted by Canadian Nuclear Laboratories.
Aggregate is delivered by rail to the U.K.’s Low-Level Waste Repository site. (Photo: NWS)
Nuclear Waste Services (NWS), which manages the disposal of the United Kingdom’s low-level radioactive waste, announced this week that a major milestone has been reached at its Low Level Waste Repository in West Cumbria, England, as work begins on the final capping of legacy disposal trenches and vaults at the site.
The Oyster Creek ISFSI. (Photo: Holtec International)
The Tax Court of New Jersey has ruled that Oyster Creek’s spent nuclear fuel storage casks are subject to taxation as real property.
The IAEA’s Rafael Mariano Grossi (far right) and other IAEA experts joined scientists from China, South Korea, and Switzerland as they collected seawater samples near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. (Photo: Dean Calma/IAEA)
International Atomic Energy Agency director general Rafael Mariano Grossi visited Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi site on February 19, where he joined scientists from the Third Institute of Oceanography in China, the Korean Institute for Nuclear Safety in South Korea, and the Spiez Laboratory in Switzerland in collecting seawater samples from a boat near the damaged nuclear power plant.
The Savannah River Site’s F Tank Farm, where Tank 4 completed preliminary cease waste removal a year ahead of schedule. (Photo: DOE)
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management said it has reached a regulatory milestone ahead of schedule in preparing radioactive waste tanks for closure at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. DOE-EM said it received concurrence in January from the South Carolina Department of Environmental Services (SCDES) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that SRS had successfully removed waste from the site’s Tank 4 and may now proceed to waste sampling and analysis of that tank ahead of its closure.
Oskarshamn nuclear power plant in Sweden. (Photo: Daniel Kihlgren)
Germany’s NUKEM Technologies Engineering Services GmbH, in partnership with Uniper Nuclear Services GmbH (UNS), has successfully completed the dismantling of the fourth and final reactor pressure vessel (RPV) at Oskarshamn nuclear power plant in Sweden. The work was done as part of the UNNU Consortium, which since 2020 has been dismantling Sweden’s four RPVs—two at the Oskarshamn site and two at the Barsebäck nuclear plant site.
The Ion Beam Facility, center, at Technical Area 03 at LANL. (Photo: DOE)
Work has started at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to deactivate, decommission, and remove the Ion Beam Facility, which played a role in research and experiments that helped develop the nation’s nuclear arsenal during the 1950s and 1960s.
A rendering of a possible geologic disposal facility on the coast of northwest England. (Image: NWS)
The U.K. government’s Nuclear Waste Services said it has identified three “areas of focus” in its search to find a suitable site and a willing community to host a geologic disposal facility (GDF) for the country’s most hazardous radioactive waste. The areas are within three communities currently involved in the siting process—Mid Copeland and South Copeland in Cumbria, and East Lincolnshire, England.
