Advanced nuclear company Oklo and data center developer Switch closed out 2024 by announcing a new partnership to deploy 12 GW of advanced nuclear power under a master power agreement.

Jay F. Kunze

We welcome ANS members with long careers in the community to submit their own stories so that the personal history of nuclear power can be captured. For information on submitting your stories, contact nucnews@ans.org.

I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pa. In 1959, I received my Ph.D. in experimental nuclear physics utilizing the 400-MeV synchrocyclotron at Carnegie Mellon University, involving measuring the scattering of pi-­mesons from protons (as a liquid hydrogen target). I joined ANS in January 1960.

I later joined General Electric’s Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion project to build a nuclear jet engine at the National Reactor Testing Station at Idaho Falls (now Idaho National Laboratory). In January 1961, the U.S. Army’s experimental nuclear reactor SL-1 blew up, killing three army personnel. At first, the Air Force would not permit General Electric to take part in the cleanup, but after the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion project was canceled by President Kennedy in March, GE took on the SL-1 disassembly and analysis project. I oversaw the analysis, which took nearly two years.

The Department of Energy’s Idaho Cleanup Project (ICP) has improved transuranic waste operations to address aging waste containers being stored at the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project (AMWTP) at the Idaho National Laboratory Site, the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management announced on December 10.

As of last week, crews with Department of Energy cleanup contractor Idaho Environmental Coalition (IEC) processed more than 142,000 gallons of radioactive sodium-bearing tank waste at Idaho’s Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) this year.

Radiant Industries has announced a $100 million Series C funding round to be used primarily to complete its Kaleidos Development Unit (KDU) microreactor for testing in Idaho National Laboratory's Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments (DOME) facility within two years.

Clean Core Thorium Energy (Clean Core) announced November 12 that test rodlets of its patented thorium-uranium fuel design known as ANEEL (advanced nuclear energy for enriched life) have reached a burnup milestone in the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) at Idaho National Laboratory.

Oklo Inc. announced yesterday that it has partnered with “two major data center providers” under letters of intent (LOIs) to deliver up to 750 MW of power from multiple 15 MW or 50 MW Oklo microreactors at data centers in “select” undisclosed U.S. markets.

Christine Roy

While flipping through the course catalog at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, I read that civil engineers can design amusement park rides. I was instantly inspired and chose my major because I wanted to design something for Walt Disney World. After college, I started my dream job at Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, which is famous for designing Spaceship Earth at Epcot Center, a celebration of human innovation, communication, and the progress of civilization. This was a win.

My introduction to nuclear

During my first two years at SGH, I experienced all aspects of working in the Engineering Mechanics & Infrastructure group, from analyzing structural failures to studying pipelines and modeling antennas. In 2006, I worked on my first nuclear facility. It consisted of structural analysis and design of the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit at Idaho National Laboratory.

The Department of Energy is proposing to fully decommission the Submarine 5th Generation General Electric (S5G) prototype at the Naval Reactors Facility on the Idaho National Laboratory site. Along with the Environmental Protection Agency and the state of Idaho, the DOE has initiated a 30-day public comment period (ending November 14) on the planned end state for the facility and its defueled reactor vessel.

Oklo Inc. announced yesterday that a safety design report for the Aurora fuel fabrication facility the company plans to build at Idaho National Laboratory has the approval of the Department of Energy. At the facility, Oklo plans to use high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) that has been recovered from used Experimental Breeder Reactor-II fuel to produce fuel for its first planned microreactor—dubbed Aurora—which is also set for deployment at INL.

On October 8, the Department of Energy’s Idaho Operations Office released the draft environmental assessment (EA) Demonstration of Microreactor Experiment (DOME) Test Bed Operations. The draft EA assesses the potential environmental impacts of plans to use the containment dome of the former Experimental Breeder Reactor-II at Idaho National Laboratory’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) to test multiple TRISO-fueled advanced reactor designs on a micro scale.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy has awarded 19 experimental proposals access to Nuclear Science User Facilities (NSUF) under the 2024 “third call” for Rapid Turnaround Experiment (RTE) projects. In total, the awards are valued at about $1 million and were granted to 19 principal investigators from 11 institutions, including universities and industry researchers.

The Department of Defense announced September 24 that it has broken ground on the site at Idaho National Laboratory’s Critical Infrastructure Test Range Complex (CITRC) where Project Pele, a transportable 1–5 MWe microreactor, will be tested. The DOD’s Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO) is in charge, on a mission to prove that a mobile microreactor can help meet the DOD’s increasing demand for resilient carbon-free energy for mission-critical operations in remote and austere environments.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy announced on September 24 four new GAIN vouchers. GAIN—the Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear—selected four companies to receive vouchers to advance microreactor technologies, identify potential sites capable of hosting a nuclear-powered data center, and prevent corrosion in molten salt reactors.

Westinghouse Electric Company has completed the front-end engineering and experiment design (FEEED) for a prototype microreactor at Idaho National Laboratory, the Department of Energy recently announced. The one-fifth scale version of eVinci, Westinghouse’s 5-MWe sodium-cooled heat pipe design, is one of three reactors that could be tested at the National Reactor Innovation Center’s (NRIC) DOME test bed “as early as 2026,” the DOE said.

On July 28, 2023, the Department of Energy launched its Cleanup to Clean Energy initiative, an effort to repurpose underutilized DOE-owned property—portions of which were previously used in the nation’s nuclear weapons program—into the sites of clean-energy generation.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced yesterday that waste processing operations have resumed at the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) at the Idaho National Laboratory Site. The resumption of operations follows the completion of two maintenance campaigns at the radioactive liquid waste treatment facility.

Crews at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory Site recently completed work to transfer baskets of spent nuclear fuel ahead of a September 30 deadline.

Today’s nuclear power plants are the nation’s largest source of carbon-free energy, but they come with high operating and maintenance costs.

Competition from other sources, especially natural gas, coupled with low electricity prices, has resulted in the closure of some plants in the last decade due to economic reasons.

One way to alleviate these economic pressures is to reduce the cost of operating nuclear power plants, including the costs associated with physical security.

Oklo Inc. announced that it has completed the first end-to-end demonstration of its advanced fuel recycling process as part of an ongoing $5 million project in collaboration with Argonne and Idaho National Laboratories. Oklo’s goal: scaling up its fuel recycling capabilities to deploy a commercial-scale recycling facility that would increase advanced reactor fuel supplies and enhance fuel cost effectiveness for its planned sodium fast reactors.