Producing hydrogen as well as electricity from the current fleet of nuclear reactors is garnering a lot of interest from stakeholders, according to representatives of four nuclear operating utilities that together operate about one-third of the U.S. nuclear fleet. That interest drew viewers to a Utility Roundtable on U.S. Leadership in Sustaining Clean, Competitive Power and Hydrogen during the June 8 opening plenary of the American Nuclear Society's 2020 Virtual Annual Meeting.

Newswire will present coverage of sessions throughout the American Nuclear Society’s 2020 Virtual Annual Meeting. Here are notes on some of the sessions covered on June 8, the opening day of the meeting.

The recipients of four American Nuclear Society awards were recognized Monday during the opening plenary session of the 2020 ANS Virtual Annual Meeting. Hussein S. Khalil, Honors and Awards Committee chair, virtually presented each award in succession.

American Nuclear Society Fellows hold the highest grade of membership in the Society. The following new Fellows were honored during Monday’s opening plenary session of the 2020 ANS Virtual Annual Meeting.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS) for Westinghouse Electric Company’s application to renew the operating license of its Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility (CFFF) in South Carolina, the agency announced in a June 5 press release. The plant produces fuel assemblies for use in commercial nuclear power reactors.

More than a thousand participants joined a Department of Energy webinar on May 29 for a discussion of the Trump administration’s strategy for restoring the United States to a globally predominant position in the field of nuclear energy. The strategy was laid out in the Nuclear Fuel Working Group’s recent report, Restoring America’s Competitive Nuclear Energy Advantage. (For details on the NRWG’s report, see our coverage here.)

Netflix recently launched History 101, a series of short documentaries that the popular streaming service calls “bite-size history lessons on scientific breakthroughs, social movements, and world-changing discoveries.” Included among episodes on topics such as fast food, plastics, and the growth of China’s global influence, is an episode on nuclear power.

From the series’ academic-sounding name, one would hope for a thoughtful, even-handed discussion of the history of nuclear technology, along with its pros and cons. Yet, with a title like “Nuclear Power: Playing with Fire,” it quickly becomes apparent that the episode provides more heat than light. As one online commenter said of the series, “This is not a history documentary; it’s a middle schooler’s slick history report.”

The antinuclear organization Beyond Nuclear has filed an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit requesting a review of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s decision to deny its petition against Holtec International’s application to build and operate a consolidated interim storage facility (CISF) for spent nuclear fuel in southeastern New Mexico.

The 2020 ANS Virtual Annual Meeting promises to be a unique event in the history of the American Nuclear Society. The first all-virtual ANS meeting runs from June 8 to 11 and is being conducted via Zoom, a videoconferencing app that has gained widespread popularity since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.

More than 1,700 registrants have already signed up, making for the largest ANS meeting in modern history. More than 90 sessions will be held, with over 200 papers to be presented. Meeting registration will be open through Wednesday, June 10.

Rendering of a Russian Project 22220 icebreaker. Image: Hanko/Wikimedia Commons

The keel for Rosatomflot’s Yakutia, the third Project 22220 nuclear-powered icebreaker, was laid at the United Shipbuilding Corporation’s Baltic Shipyard in St. Petersburg on May 26, according to a press release from Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned atomic energy corporation. Rosatomflot is a subsidiary of Rosatom.

Nuclear technology for space exploration just took a giant step forward. Researchers at the National Nuclear Security Administration and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have conducted a series of tests as part of NASA’s Kilopower project for the development of a nuclear space reactor. The results have been published in a special issue of the American Nuclear Society’s journal Nuclear Technology, which includes eight papers that cover the design and testing of the Kilowatt Reactor Using Stirling TechnologY (KRUSTY) reactor, a 1-kWe space reactor with a cast uranium core, heat pipes, and Stirling engine power conversion.

A fish-eye view of the refurbished Darlington-2. Photo: Ontario Power Generation

Ontario Power Generation’s (OPG) massive project to refurbish all of its Darlington nuclear power plant reactors has reached its first major milestone with the successful completion of Unit 2’s refurbishment and reconnection to Ontario’s electricity grid, the utility stated in a June 4 media release.

The Darlington plant, located in Clarington, Ontario, Canada, houses four 878-MWe PHWR CANDU reactors, all of which entered commercial operation in the early 1990s. The 10-year refurbishment project, which also was 10 years in the planning, began in earnest in October 2016, when Unit 2 was taken off line (NN, Dec. 2016, pg. 45).

Brouillette

Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette said in a June 1 announcement to Department of Energy employees that given the recent lifting of stay-at-home orders in the Washington, D.C., area, the department will allow some federal employees to return to work at DOE headquarters, beginning on June 8.

Framatome has completed its acquisition of BWX Technologies’ U.S. commercial nuclear services business, the France-based company announced on June 2. With this transaction, the company said, Framatome expands its portfolio of equipment and tooling for nuclear power plant inspections and maintenance.

BWXT will receive an 118,000-square-foot manufacturing facility and the associated 11 acres of land from Framatome in the cashless exchange.

The 1,250-ton cryostat base is positioned over the ITER tokamak pit for installation. The base is the heaviest lift of the tokamak assembly. Photo: ITER

ITER, the world’s largest international scientific collaboration, is beginning the assembly of the fusion reactor tokamak that will include 12 essential hardware systems provided by US ITER, which is managed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The first major machine element to be installed is the 1,250-ton base of the cryostat, which was placed into the tokamak assembly pit on May 26. ITER is located in southeastern France.

The European Commission released a plan for rejuvenating Europe’s pandemic-damaged economy, including a green energy program that calls for “rolling out renewable energy projects, especially wind [and] solar, and kick-starting a clean hydrogen economy.” No mention was made of nuclear energy, however, an omission for which the commission was taken to task that same day by Foratom, the Brussels-based trade association for the European nuclear energy industry.

Concrete pour at the Hinkley Point C2 reactor. Photo: EDF Energy

Workers at the Hinkley Point C nuclear construction project in the United Kingdom have completed the 49,000-ton base for the station’s second reactor, Unit C2, hitting a target date set more than four years ago, according to EDF Energy.

Gender Champions in Nuclear Policy (GCNP), launched in November 2018, has released a report on the progress made during its inaugural year toward its goal of achieving gender equity in the nuclear policy field. According to a May 28 announcement, the group has had “mostly positive results.”

To get a job done, you need the right tool. Researchers now have one that will make their job easier—the Radioactivity and Damage (RAD) Calculator from the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Science User Facilities.

Most experiments conducted through the NSUF have the same underlying goal: quantifying irradiation effects on nuclear fuels and materials. Rather than doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation or a costly in-depth analysis with a nuclear engineer, users now have the flexibility to rapidly change experimental design parameters—such as selecting the reactor to be used, the sample location within the reactor, displacements per atom desired, and the time frame—and see which NSUF reactor can produce the desired result, all within seconds.