It’s 1976, and you’re watching TV when a public service announcement from the American Nuclear Society airs, showing the earth being squeezed dry of its last drops of oil by a giant hand as it urges more “safe, reliable, and economical” nuclear power plants. The narrator’s last words, intoned over a fading sunset, still ring true today: “Our world is hungry for energy, and we must move ahead to preserve our future. If we don’t, we could find ourselves in the dark ages of the seventies.”

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is increasing its oversight of the Waterford Steam Electric Station’s Unit 3 reactor due to a decade-long miscalibration of a radiation monitor.

In a September 13 letter to Entergy Operations, the NRC classified the issue at the Killona, La., facility as a “white finding”—agency parlance for a problem of low to moderate safety significance. (The NRC’s Reactor Oversight Process uses color-coded inspection findings and indicators to measure plant performance, starting at green and increasing to white, yellow, and red, commensurate with the safety significance of the issues involved.)

Nuclear power generation surpassed coal generation in the United States for the first time in 2020. As utilities continue to retire coal-fired plants, reusing the shuttered sites to host nuclear reactors could help the nation reach the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 and prove economically beneficial both for nuclear deployments and for the communities impacted by fossil fuel generation. That’s according to a Department of Energy report released this week, detailing how hundreds of U.S. coal power plant sites that have recently retired or plan to close within the decade could be suitable for new nuclear power plants. Nuclear power’s high capacity factors mean those plants could deliver an added benefit—delivering more baseload power to the grid from the nameplate capacity replacement.

In an essay titled “How the Fed will Strangle New Nukes,” published this week by American Thinker, nuclear engineer and writer Joseph Somsel warns that despite current expectations of a nuclear construction boom, “As in the late 1970s, rising interest rates will put the kibosh on new nukes.” Somsel therefore urges the financing and building of new nuclear facilities right now, before ongoing inflation and increasingly high interest rates “kill a lot of the plans” for new nuclear power plants.

BWXT Medical has submitted a new drug application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to request approval of its technetium-99m generator for medical imaging. A daughter isotope of molybdenum-99, Tc-99m is used in more than 40 million diagnostic procedures annually. BWXT Medical is a subsidiary of Lynchburg, Va.-based BWX Technologies.

In a first for the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site, a former reactor facility is being demolished. The site’s cleanup contractor, UCOR, began tearing down the Bulk Shielding Reactor, also known as Building 3010, last week.

“While this project is not the biggest demolition we’ve undertaken, it carries a lot of significance,” said Laura Wilkerson, acting manager for the Oak Ridge Office of the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM). “It is the first removal of a former reactor at [Oak Ridge National Laboratory], and it is a signal of much more to come at the site in the immediate future.”

Research with the Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab) has revealed new insights into short-range correlations—the brief pairings of nucleons (protons with neutrons, protons with protons, or neutrons with neutrons) in the nuclei of atoms. The study, published in Nature, used precision measurements to determine that short-range correlations differ depending on the density of the nucleus, that is, how many nucleons it contains.

Nagra, Switzerland’s national cooperative for the disposal of radioactive waste, has announced that it has selected Nördlich Lägern as the site for a deep geological repository for radioactive waste. According to Nagra, extensive investigations have shown that Nördlich Lägern, located in northern Switzerland near the German border, is the most suitable area for a geologic repository with the best overall safety reserves.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission yesterday announced that it has issued a renewed license for Westinghouse Electric Company’s Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility (CFFF), authorizing operations at the plant for another 40 years—through September 12, 2062.

Located in Hopkins, S.C., the CFFF manufactures fuel rods for use in commercial nuclear reactors. According to Westinghouse, 10 percent of the nation’s electricity comes from the fuel manufactured at the facility.

After more than a year of discussion and planning, American Nuclear Society Executive Director/CEO Craig Piercy recently signed an agreement with open research (OR) publisher F1000 (a subsidiary of Taylor & Francis) to create a new publishing platform that adopts F1000’s innovative open research methodology and technology. A generous, sustaining donation from ANS member Sushil C. Jain, P.E., will allow ANS to bring this plan from idea to reality. All content published on the new ANS F1000 platform will be free and open to the public. Both organizations are excited to begin this critical step forward, bringing ANS scholarly publications into the future.

Scientists in the Departments of Radiation Oncology and Medicine at the University of Washington (UW) and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center (Fred Hutch) are directly targeting cancerous cells traveling through patients’ bloodstreams with diseases such as leukemia and lymphoma using an intravenous injection of the radioactive isotope astatine-211 (At-211). The work, its challenges, and its promise were described in a recent news release from the National Isotope Development Center (NIDC), which is managed by the Department of Energy’s Isotope Program.

Maybe hold off commenting on those Palisades decommissioning plans for now: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer last Friday penned a letter to energy secretary Jennifer Granholm pledging state support for a Holtec International plan to restart the recently shuttered Palisades nuclear plant in Covert, Mich. It was Whitmer’s second letter to the Department of Energy head expressing support for Palisades and touting its value to the state.

Steven Arndt
president@ans.org

Much has been written about regulation over the years, including whether or not the nuclear industry is overregulated or whether the regulator is in the industry’s “pocket.” Having a capable and independent regulator is important to the industry for a number of reasons, such as ensuring the safety and security of nuclear facilities and the trust an effective regulator can engender in vendors, investors, international organizations, and the public. However, regulation simply to engender trust or ensure all voices are heard is neither effective nor sufficiently adaptive to support a vibrant and innovative industry. Moreover, overregulation slows innovation, stifles creativity, drives costs upward, and creates scheduling challenges.

So how did the Nuclear Regulatory Commission become the “gold standard” of regulation? The pat response is because of its long history, experience, and available resources. I would contend, however, that what the NRC did better than most—if not all—national nuclear regulators was innovate and develop new ideas and act as the cocreator of the nuclear industry.

ENUSA’s president and CEO Mariano Moreno (left) and Westinghouse’s nuclear fuel president Tarik Choho shake hands on their latest partnership. (Photo: Westinghouse)

Westinghouse Electric Company and Madrid-based ENUSA intend to collaborate on VVER-440 fuel fabrication, the American firm announced last week at the World Nuclear Association’s World Nuclear Symposium.

The partnership, Westinghouse stated in a September 8 release, “will build on decades of performance delivering a Western alternative to Russian fuel in the European market.” There are currently 16 nuclear power reactors in Europe operating with VVER-440 fuel, and utilities in the region are actively looking for alternatives to Russian-supplied fuel for those units, according to the release.

Signers’ language: “We have a mutual interest in partnering in VVER-440 fuel manufacturing and potentially other related areas,” said Tarik Choho, Westinghouse’s president of nuclear fuel. “With our proven track record supplying for VVER reactors, we stand ready to support even greater energy security for our customers and European countries. We look forward to strengthening our partnership with ENUSA and leveraging their valuable experience in this field.”

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission last Friday announced the publication of its ninth report to the Convention on Nuclear Safety, describing the federal government’s actions under the convention to achieve and maintain safety for the nation’s nuclear power reactor fleet.

An International Atomic Energy Agency treaty, the Convention on Nuclear Safety was adopted in 1994 and entered into force in 1996. In 1999, it was ratified by the U.S. Senate.

The aim of the convention, according to the IAEA, is to “commit contracting parties operating land-based civil nuclear power plants to maintain a high level of safety by establishing fundamental safety principles to which states would subscribe.” Signatories are required to submit reports for peer review at meetings held every three years.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has made Holtec International’s post-shutdown decommissioning activities report (PSDAR) for the closed Palisades nuclear power plant available for public comment until December 27. The NRC also plans to hold a public meeting to discuss the report on the evening of September 22 at the South Haven campus of Lake Michigan College, about 10 miles north of the Palisades site in Covert, Mich.

Who better to talk with about the licensing of nuclear facilities and materials than Christopher T. Hanson, the chairman of the five-member Nuclear Regulatory Commission? Hanson is the principal executive officer of and official spokesman for the NRC. As a collegial body, the Commission formulates policies, develops regulations governing nuclear reactor and nuclear material safety, issues orders to licensees, and adjudicates legal matters.

The Department of Energy is offering cost-shared funding that could lead to the demonstration of an “energy park” drawing 20–300 MW of thermal energy from a U.S. nuclear power plant under a funding opportunity amendment issued in August by the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) program, in coordination with the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office.

Research by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and collaborating institutions has the potential to improve plasma performance in tokamak nuclear fusion reactors, according to a recent paper in Nuclear Fusion. The research focused on the use of a PPPL-developed dropper to apply coatings of boron powder to the tungsten components inside a tokamak, thereby helping protect the tungsten against the intensely hot plasma. According to lead author Grant Bodner, this process offers “a way to deposit boron coatings without turning off the tokamaks’ magnetic field.”

At this writing, the situation at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is as fraught with tension as ever, despite an International Atomic Energy Agency support and assistance mission to the site last week led by director general Rafael Mariano Grossi.