New ultrasonic testing equipment being used by the Department of Energy’s Idaho Cleanup Project (ICP) to confirm the integrity of thousands of legacy waste drums is saving taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management announced.

The technology allows ICP personnel to inspect the thickness transuranic waste drums held in storage at the DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory Site, ensuring they meet Department of Transportation minimum thickness requirements to be shipped for disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. According to DOE-EM, if drums meet the DOT thickness requirements, they can be loaded directly into shipping casks without the need for an expensive overpack container, leading to a minimum cost savings of $26 million.

For over a decade, the DOE’s Hanford Field Office (HFO) has been working with national laboratories, universities, and glass industry experts to establish capabilities and generate data to increase the confidence in a successful startup and transition to full-time operations at the WTP.

BWX Technologies Inc. has purchased about 97 acres of land in an Oak Ridge, Tenn., industrial park where the company expects to build a uranium enrichment facility using a technology called DUECE, or, Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment. DUECE was developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to provide enriched uranium for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, and BWXT is several months into a yearlong engineering study to evaluate options for deploying a centrifuge pilot plant using DUECE.

Seattle-based TerraPower signaled its interest this week in building its Natrium small modular reactor in the United Kingdom, the company announced.

TerraPower sent a letter to the U.K.’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, formally establishing its intention to enter the U.K. generic design assessment (GDA) process. This is TerraPower’s first step in deployment of its Natrium technology—a 345-MW sodium fast reactor coupled with a molten salt energy storage unit—on the international stage.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has successfully removed legacy radioactive waste stored for more than five decades, marking a significant cleanup milestone. The Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) and cleanup contractor UCOR processed and shipped highly radioactive source material, including radium-226 and boron, out of state for permanent disposal.

A group of universities led by the American Association of Universities (AAU) acted swiftly to oppose a policy action by the Department of Energy that would cut the funds it pays to universities for the indirect costs of research under DOE grants. The group filed suit Monday, April 14, challenging a what it termed a “flagrantly unlawful action” that could “devastate scientific research at America’s universities.”

By Wednesday, the U.S. District Court judge hearing the case issued a temporary restraining order effective nationwide, preventing the DOE from implementing the policy or terminating any existing grants.

The American Nuclear Society’s Risk-informed, Performance-based Principles and Policy Committee (RP3C) held another presentation in its monthly Community of Practice (CoP) series on April 4.

The cost to complete the cleanup of the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state could cost as much as $589.4 billion, according to the 2025 Hanford Lifecycle Scope, Schedule, and Cost Report, which was released by the DOE on April 15. While that estimate is $44.2 billion lower than the DOE’s 2022 estimate of $640.6 billion, a separate, low-end estimate has since grown by more than 21 percent, to $364 billion.

The life cycle report, which the DOE is legally required to issue every three years under agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Washington State Department of Ecology (Ecology), summarizes the remaining work scope, schedule, and cost estimates for the nuclear site. For more than 40 years, Hanford’s reactors produced plutonium for America’s defense program.

Leaders in Ghana announced recently that the country has a “framework agreement” with U.S.-based companies NuScale and Regnum Technology Group.

The announcement made by Stephen Yamoah, executive director of Nuclear Power Ghana, was reported by the Ghana News Agency on March 31. He also said Japanese firms will be working in partnership with NuScale and Regnum on the small modular reactors while the China National Nuclear Corporation will construct a large reactor.

The Optimized Segmentation process patented by Orano Decommissioning Services was successfully implemented for the first time at the Crystal River Unit 3 (CR-3) decommissioning project in Florida [1]. Using this approach, Orano was able to avoid the time- and resource-intensive process of packaging components into numerous standardized waste containers and significantly reduced the required segmentation activities.

The University of Missouri announced today that it has signed a $10 million contract for the initial design phase of the $1 billion-plus state-of-the-art NextGen MURR research reactor project.

Utah-based EnergySolutions has announced it has been awarded two contracts worth a combined $84.6 million from the U.S. Navy to support waste management operations across multiple Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program sites. According to the company, the indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts will enable the secure transportation, receipt, processing, recycling and reduction, and disposal of nuclear materials from key naval sites nationwide.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has doubled down on its rejection of an interconnection service agreement (ISA) between Amazon Web Services and Talen Energy in Pennsylvania.

Two recent news stories—the Department of Defense’s launching of the Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations (ANPI) program and the development of prototype nuclear batteries in Japan and South Korea—are tied together in an article by London-based writer Nick O’Hara, creator of the Substack Gridlocked: Why the 21st Century is Broken and How to Fix It.

According to O’Hara, these two developments taken together “could be the shard of light we need in otherwise dark times. Because innovations in advanced nuclear technology could be critical to unlocking the path to decarbonizing our societies and combatting climate change.”

Plans to bring a university research reactor like no other to the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) were punctuated last fall by the news that Ultra Safe Nuclear, the developer of the gas-cooled reactor technology selected for the Illinois Microreactor Project, had declared bankruptcy.

Tokyo Electric Power Company is scheduled this week to begin retrieving a second sample of nuclear fuel debris from Unit 2 of Japan’s damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. This second retrieval comes after TEPCO improved the telescopic device used to gather samples.

Researchers at GE Hitachi Nuclear recently completed a successful test on potential new building blocks made of steel-concrete composite.

The 50th anniversary of the founding of the Latin American Section of the American Nuclear Society is today: April 14, 2025! LAS/ANS was created with the goal of representing the interests of the nuclear professionals of Latin America.

The Defense Innovation Unit announced April 10 next steps in the Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations (ANPI) program, launched in 2024 to deploy microreactor nuclear systems for increased power reliability at select military locations.

Jarrell

Roger Jarrell will lead the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management as the new principal deputy assistant secretary. Jarrell, who served in the office during the first Trump administration, was named DOE-EM senior advisor in January. Prior to that, he served as the general counsel and previously was the government and stakeholder interface at DOE cleanup contractor UCOR, of Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Jarrell takes over the assistant secretary position, listed on DOE-EM’s organizational chart as EM-2, from Dae Chung, a long-serving DOE-EM executive who was tapped by the Trump administration in March to lead the office as acting principal deputy assistant secretary following the departure of Candice Robertson, who had led the office since June 2024.