The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has announced it has amended regulations for the licensing, inspection, special projects, and annual fees it will charge applicants and licensees for fiscal year 2025.

This spring, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced that it had achieved a major milestone by completing commissioning of the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System (SSCVS) facility—a new, state-of-the-art, large-scale ventilation system at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the DOE’s geologic repository for defense-related transuranic (TRU) waste in New Mexico.

The Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (Svensk Kärnbränslehantering AB, or SKB) has signed a collaboration agreement with the multinational construction company Implenia to build the first underground section of a deep repository for radioactive waste near Sweden’s Forsmark nuclear power plant.

Centrus Energy has secured a contract extension from the Department of Energy to continue—for one year—its ongoing high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) production at the American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio, at an annual rate of 900 kilograms of HALEU UF₆. That's the same amount of HALEU—900 kg—that the company today announced it has delivered to the DOE, completing Phase II of its contract. According to Centrus, the contract extension, which allows the company to begin Phase III, is valued at about $110 million through June 30, 2026.

U.S.-based private capital group Apollo Global has committed £4.5 billion ($6.13 billion) in financing to EDF Energy, primarily to support the U.K.’s Hinkley Point C station. The move addresses funding needs left unmet since China General Nuclear Power Corporation—which originally planned to pay for one-third of the project—exited in 2023 amid U.K. government efforts to reduce Chinese involvement.

SMR developer Arc Clean Technology has signed a memorandum of understanding with Deep Atomic to jointly explore deployment opportunities across North America.

As the global energy landscape shifts toward safer, smaller, and more flexible nuclear power, Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and Generation IV technologies are at the forefront of innovation. These advanced designs pose new challenges in size, efficiency, and operating environment that traditional instrumentation and control solutions aren’t always designed to handle.

The Utilities Service Alliance and Curio have signed a memorandum of understanding that may lead to future supplier-partner agreements between USA’s utility members and Curio.

Plastic waste is polluting the oceans and entering the human body in the form of microplastics. According to the United Nations, without immediate action the amount of plastic finding a way into the oceans each year could reach 37 million metric tons by 2040, becoming a threat to marine and human life.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has instructed the state’s public electric utility to add at least 1 gigawatt of new nuclear by building a large-scale nuclear plant or a collection of smaller modular reactors, according to the Wall Street Journal.

You could call it a power contest. Teams picked for a new research program from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will compete to design radiovoltaic cells that can outperform others in measured power density and endure high-flux radiation from a U.S. Army Research Lab linear accelerator. The top teams will strive to make it through a second downselect based on the performance of cells sequestered in time capsules and subjected to even more punishing high-flux radiation. Concepts that make it to the bonus period have a chance to be built into radioisotope-fueled power systems uniquely suited to high-radiation regions of space or dark, remote places on Earth.

The next opportunity to earn professional engineer (PE) licensure in nuclear engineering is this fall, and now is the time to sign up and begin studying with the help of materials like the online module program offered by the American Nuclear Society.

Paragon Energy Solutions has signed a memorandum of understanding with Terra Innovatum, a developer of micro-modular nuclear reactors, to support the design and integration of instrumentation and control systems for Terra’s Solo micro-modular reactor. Paragon is a provider of safety-related I&C systems for the nuclear energy community.

Matt Bowen

With a new administration and Congress, it is time once again to ponder what will happen—if anything—on U.S. spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste management policy over the next few years. One element of the forthcoming discussion seems clear: The executive and legislative branches are eager to talk about recycling commercial SNF. Whatever the merits of doing so, it does not obviate the need for one or more facilities for disposal of remaining long-lived radionuclides. For that reason, making progress on U.S. disposal capabilities remains urgent, lest the associated radionuclide inventories simply be left for future generations to deal with.

In March, Rick Perry, who was secretary of energy during President Trump’s first administration, observed that during his tenure at the Department of Energy it became clear to him that any plan to move SNF “required some practical consent of the receiving state and local community.”¹

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management and its cleanup contractor CH2M Hill BWXT West Valley (CHBWV) completed the on-time removal of the Main Plant Process Building at the West Valley Demonstration Project (WVDP) in New York. Located 35 miles south of Buffalo, the 150-acre WVDP site is home to the only commercial spent nuclear fuel reprocessing facility to operate in the United States.

Details of the plan to test new reactor concepts under the Department of Energy’s authority but outside national laboratory boundaries—first outlined in one of the four executive orders on nuclear energy released on May 23—were just released in a request for applications issued by the DOE.

Husband-and-wife team Timothy Adkins and Ann Gibeaut are using Geiger counters supplied by the American Nuclear Society to educate young people in West Virginia about nuclear science and ionizing radiation. In 2022, ANS donated some old nonfunctioning Geiger counters to Tim and Ann, who recalibrated them and got them working again.

The Supreme Court voted 6–3 against Texas and a group of landowners today in a case involving the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing of a consolidated interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel, reversing a decision by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to grant the state and landowners Fasken Land and Minerals (Fasken) standing to challenge the license.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management said that crews at its Hanford Site in Washington state are preparing for the site’s first-ever transfer of radioactive waste from one of its large underground tanks, Tank AP-106, to the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP).

Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has shared his concerns about the Iran-Israel conflict with the agency’s board of directors.

“Military escalation threatens lives, increases the chance of a radiological release with serious consequences for people and the environment and delays indispensable work towards a diplomatic solution for the long-term assurance that Iran does not acquire a nuclear weapon,” Grossi said on June 16. “Consistent with the objectives of the IAEA and its statute, I call on all parties to exercise maximum restraint to avoid further escalation.”