The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has made three recent announcements regarding new developments in the nuclear energy industry:

Five of ANS’s past Congressional Fellows recently shared their unique experiences on Capitol Hill and gave insights into how they were able to have an impact on federal policy related to nuclear, exploring what they learned about the policymaking process and how ANS can continue having an impact in Washington.

The Department of Energy’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (MDF) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in partnership with Kairos Power and Barnard Construction, has successfully developed and validated large-scale, 3D-printed polymer composite forms for casting complex concrete structures.

The test took place at Kairos Power’s Oak Ridge, Tenn., campus, where the Hermes Low-Power Demonstration Reactor is currently under construction.

See a video of construction activity here.

The Palisades nuclear power plant has been formally transitioned from decommissioning status to holding an operating license following the completion of an extensive technical review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It’s a historic move; before this, no U.S. nuclear plant had ever made the transition from shut down to approved for restart.

EnergySolutions has announced that it has been selected for the U.S. Navy’s Radiological Support Services (RADMAC III) multiple-award contract, valued at up to $240 million. EnergySolutions will lead a team that includes Tetra Tech EC and small business partners such as TerranearPMC, along with numerous others, to provide radiological response, investigation, and remediation services to the U.S. Naval Facilities Engineering Command Southwest.

Editor's note: This article has was originally published in November 2023. It has been updated with new information as of June 2025.

Outside my office, there is a display case filled with rock samples from all over the world. It contains a disk of translucent, orange salt from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.; a core of white-and-bronze gneiss from the site of the future deep geologic repository in Eurajoki, Finland; several angular chunks of fine-grained, gray claystone from the underground research laboratory at Bure, France; and a piece of coarse-grained granite from the underground research tunnel in Daejeon, South Korea.

The United States has tight new deadlines—18 months, max—for licensing commercial reactor designs. The Department of Energy is marshaling the nuclear expertise and high-performance computing assets of its national laboratories, in partnership with private tech companies, to develop generative AI tools and large-scale simulations that could help get nuclear reactor designs through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing process—or the DOE’s own reactor pilot program. “Accelerate” and “streamline” are the verbs of choice in recent announcements from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory, as they describe plans with Atomic Canyon, Microsoft, and Amazon.

The OECD Nuclear Energy Agency has published the third edition of the NEA Small Modular Reactor Dashboard, a comprehensive global review of SMR technology that defines criteria for assessing progress in the development of these advanced reactors. The assessments are based on six dimensions of readiness: licensing, siting, financing, supply chain, engagement, and fuel.

At the end of his July 15 speech at the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, President Trump promised that “a lot more [was] going to be announced in the coming week” for the energy and AI sectors.

A research team led by Canadian Nuclear Laboratories is studying a type of high-entropy alloy (HEA) that seems to withstand a cascade-involved irradiation environment at elevated temperatures better than stainless steel exposed to similar conditions. In a paper published in the Journal of Nuclear Materials, the researchers describe an HEA made of chromium, iron, manganese, and nickel (CrFeMnNi) that has the potential to improve the safety and functionality of nuclear reactors, as well as of spacecraft.

From 2003 to 2011, staff at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site downblended high-enriched uranium in the site’s H Canyon, producing over 300 metric tons (MT) of low-enriched uranium that was fabricated into fuel. The facility has since been idled, but downblending could soon begin again—this time to high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU).

Kathryn Higley

For nearly a century, the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements has served as the United States’ leading authority on radiation protection. Established in 1929 as the Advisory Committee on X-ray and Radium Protection, the NCRP was created in response to growing concerns about the health risks of radiation exposure following the discoveries of X-rays and radioactivity.

It was formally chartered by Congress in 1964 through Public Law 88-376, also known as the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements Charter Act. The NCRP has provided science-­based guidance for the public, workers, and the environment. Its work spans a wide range of topics, including protecting patients and workers in medical, industrial, and environmental settings; supporting emergency preparedness; developing risk models for low-dose exposures; guiding safe practices for new technologies such as advanced nuclear reactors; and providing information on wireless communication devices.

BWX Technologies (BWXT) has achieved a key milestone in its project to additively manufacture advanced forms of TRISO fuel for Generation IV advanced nuclear reactors. The Lynchburg Technology Center of subsidiary company BWXT Advanced Technologies, located in Lynchburg, Va., has successfully installed and tested a chemical vapor infiltration (CVI) furnace that solidifies pre-forms that are then filled with TRISO particles, a fuel consisting of carbon and silicon layers surrounding a uranium kernel.

In back-to-back press releases, Oklo recently announced two new partnerships that seek to advance the deployment of its commercial power reactors in the data center market.

These partnerships, one with Ohio-based Vertiv Holdings and one with Colorado-based Liberty Energy, continue Oklo’s trend in working to position their Aurora powerhouse as a key part of the energy solution for powering the AI boom.

The Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX) is a new joint conference hosted by the American Nuclear Society and the Nuclear Energy Institute. The inaugural offering of the conference, NECX 2025, will be held September 8–11 in Atlanta, Ga.

To register for the event and reserve your room at the host hotel, the Atlanta Marriott Marquis, click here.

The Trump administration has dismissed seven of the (formerly) eight board members of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, the independent federal agency tasked with evaluating the technical and scientific validity of Department of Energy activities related to managing and disposing of high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel.

Leaders from private companies, government, and national laboratories gathered at Argonne National Laboratory on July 17 and 18 for an exclusive AI x Nuclear Energy Executive Summit that the Department of Energy called a first-of-its-kind forum to “align next-generation nuclear systems with the needs of digital infrastructure.”

Researchers with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working with scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Orléans, have modeled radionuclide behavior in deep geologic formations, offering a tool for developing a defensible safety case for the underground disposal of radioactive waste.

Hash Hashemian
president@ans.org

I am deeply honored and grateful to have been elected president of the American Nuclear Society. Your support and confidence in me are truly humbling, and I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to each and every one of you.

As president, my top priority is to expedite the deployment of new nuclear reactors, beginning with small modular reactors and eventually progressing to Generation IV systems. I will also work to ensure that the United States keeps its global leadership in this field. For the U.S. to do that, the federal government must maintain and expand its financial support of the nuclear industry by preserving critical incentives, tax provisions, and infrastructure investments.

Less than a week after news broke of the U.S. entering into civil nuclear talks with Malaysia, the U.S. State Department announced that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Bahrain’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani have also signed a memorandum of understanding concerning civil nuclear cooperation.