How can radiation protection professionals support the global demand for nuclear energy?

July 30, 2025, 7:02AMNuclear NewsMauritius Hiller

Mauritius Hiller

The nuclear industry is being pushed forward by a global tailwind that includes plans for more conventional nuclear plants and an exciting trend toward developing small modular reactors. These include advanced safety features and novel reactor designs, often powered by new types of fuel.

This new technology must meet existing stringent safety and security demands and must be safe for the environment, workers, and general population. Wide acceptance of international standards, as well as standardization of designs and plant concepts, will help in the long run.

Radiation protection (RP) professionals play a key role from the very start of the design phase. There is rapid and continuous development in the field of RP. Improved computational tools enable better modeling and understanding of radiation shielding, detection, and effects. Nuclear safeguards and nuclear criticality safety are increasingly important.

On North Carolina's ratification of Senate Bill 266

July 29, 2025, 5:17PMANS Nuclear CafeSteve Rae
North Carolina's State Legislative Building in Raleigh.

I have been a North Carolinian for 62 years and involved in the state’s nuclear energy industry from my high school days to today. I have seen firsthand how North Carolina has flourished. This growth has been due to the state’s enterprising people and strong leaders. Clean, competitive, and always-on nuclear power has also played an important role.

“Trailblazer” Hanford engineer Wanda Munn passes away

July 29, 2025, 12:00PMNuclear News

Munn

Nuclear engineer and longtime ANS member Wanda Munn died on July 23 at the age of 93. Described as a “trailblazer for women [and] an outspoken advocate for the peaceful use of nuclear technology” in her Tri-City (Wash.) Herald obituary, Munn followed a unique path to her nuclear engineering career. She did not get her degree until she was 46, and she subsequently spent 18 years working on systems design, construction, and operation of the Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF) reactor for Westinghouse at the Hanford nuclear site in eastern Washington state.

Nontraditional student: Munn was born in 1931. She graduated high school early, at age 16, and started to pursue a medical degree. However, those plans changed when she married at age 18. By her early 40s, she was divorced and working as a secretary in a university nuclear engineering department when she decided to return to school to get a nuclear engineering degree.

ANS hosts webinar on a risk-informed framework for nuclear security risks

July 29, 2025, 9:30AMNuclear News

The American Nuclear Society’s Risk-informed, Performance-based Principles and Policy Committee (RP3C) has held another presentation in its monthly Community of Practice (CoP) series. Former RP3C chair N. Prasad Kadambi opened the June 27 meeting with brief introductory remarks about the RP3C and the need for new approaches to nuclear design that go beyond conventional and deterministic methods. He then welcomed this month’s speaker: Tim Sande, a senior manager responsible for probabilistic risk assessments (PRA) and risk-informed engineering at Enercon, who presented “A Risk-Informed Framework for Managing Nuclear Facility Security Risks.”

Watch the full webinar here.

3D printing to quicken construction and lower costs tested at Kairos Power campus

July 28, 2025, 12:04PMNuclear News
The 3D-printed forms—inside of which concrete is poured—are used to build radiation shielding columns for Kairos Power’s Hermes Low-Power Demonstration Reactor. (Screen capture from ORNL video)

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.

Palisades gets a key green light from NRC

July 28, 2025, 9:32AMNuclear News
Acting director of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation Greg Bowman (seated, left) and Holtec president Kelly Trice (seated, right) and other NRC officials celebrate the Palisades license restoration at the NRC headquarters. (Photo: NRC)

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 selected for Navy rad services contract

July 28, 2025, 7:00AMRadwaste Solutions

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.

Deep geologic repository progress—2025 Update

July 25, 2025, 3:00PMNuclear NewsEmily Stein

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.

ORNL, INL make deals on AI for nuclear licensing

July 25, 2025, 12:00PMNuclear News
ORNL leadership gathered at the Nuclear Opportunities Workshop in Knoxville, with Trey Lauderdale, CEO of Atomic Canyon. From left: Joe Hoagland, Director of Special Initiatives; Susan Hubbard, Deputy for Science and Technology; Stephen Streiffer, ORNL Director; Lauderdale; Gina Tourassi, Associate Laboratory Director for Computing and Computational Sciences; and Mickey Wade, Associate Laboratory Director for Fusion and Fission Energy and Science. (Photo: Carlos Jones/ORNL)

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.

NEA publishes new SMR Dashboard

July 25, 2025, 9:30AMNuclear News

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.

CNL investigates alloy with potential reactor applications

July 24, 2025, 3:00PMNuclear News

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.

Savannah River Site could produce 3.1 MT of HALEU as downblending plan okayed

July 24, 2025, 12:00PMNuclear News
H Canyon under construction in the early 1950s (left) and in 2010. (Photos: Savannah River Site)

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).

NCRP—The nation’s council

July 24, 2025, 9:30AMNuclear NewsKathryn Higley

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.

BWXT advances on TRISO project

July 24, 2025, 7:01AMNuclear News
The chemical vapor infiltration furnace at BWXT’s Lynchburg Technology Center in Lynchburg, Va. (Photo: BWXT)

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.

Oklo announces plans to collaborate with Vertiv and Liberty

July 23, 2025, 3:03PMNuclear News
Vertiv and Oklo plan to collaborate on modular, energy-efficient power and cooling systems and designs developed to support data centers driven by nuclear power. (Image: Oklo)

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.

Join ANS and NEI at NECX 2025 in Atlanta

July 23, 2025, 12:00PMANS News

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.

Trump expels all but one member of nuclear waste oversight board

July 23, 2025, 9:31AMRadwaste Solutions

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.