The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has awarded BWX Technologies a contract valued at $1.5 billion to build a Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment (DUECE) pilot plant in Tennessee in support of the administration’s efforts to build out a domestic supply of unobligated enriched uranium for defense-related nuclear fuel.

As interest and investment grows around AI applications in nuclear power plants, there remains a gap in standardized benchmarks that can quantitatively compare and measure the quality and reliability of new products.

Nuclear-tailored AI developer Atomic Canyon is moving to fill that gap by entering into a new strategic partnership with Idaho National Laboratory to develop and release the “first comprehensive benchmark suite for evaluating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and large language models (LLMs) in nuclear applications.”

Late last week saw two announcements from companies working to recycle used nuclear fuel on a commercial scale, providing welcome news to anyone hoping to see the United States move to unlock the hidden potential of the more than 94,000 metric tons of spent fuel stored at power plant sites around the country.

The Department of Energy announced recently it will provide more than $35 million for 42 projects to help move emerging energy technologies from DOE national laboratories, plants, and sites related to grid security, artificial intelligence, nuclear energy, and advanced manufacturing to the marketplace. The selected projects will leverage over $21 million in cost-share from private and public partners, bringing total funding to more than $57.5 million.

A full list of the FY2025 selections is available here.

The American Nuclear Society’s Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Division (NNPD) held a webinar recently exploring the security aspects of floating and offshore nuclear power.

Moderator Shikha Prasad, CEO of Srijan LLC and immediate past chair of the NNPD, began the discussion by recapping the recent exponential growth in the field and its future economic potential before introducing the presenters, each of whom spoke about the work they and their organizations are doing to advance the field.

Below are brief summaries of each speaker’s presentation. To see their thoughts and the ensuing Q&A, click here.

In May, the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator in Greifswald, Germany, concluded an experimental campaign by sustaining a plasma with a high triple product for 43 seconds. The machine far surpassed its own previous performance with a value that the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) says “exceeds previous tokamak records for long plasma durations”—in part because of a fuel pellet injection system developed by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Watch ORNL’s video of that fuel pellet injection system—in use since September 2024—as it extrudes a column of frozen hydrogen and then cuts individual 3.2-millimeter-long pellets. The process, which takes just half a millisecond, was captured in slow motion by ORNL engineer Steve Meitner.

Graphite is a key component of traditional nuclear reactors—many of which are aging. Because graphite tends to swell and fail after lengthy exposure to radiation, it is essential to maintain its structural integrity over the lifetime of a plant.

Recently, a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and other institutions reported a new and better way to evaluate the quality of the graphite. This new procedure could allow nuclear power plant operators to predict structural failure before it happens in a more accurate and less destructive way than is currently available.

The article “Finding the shadows in a fusion system faster with AI,” published by the Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, details the public-private partnership among PPPL, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The partnership has led to a new artificial intelligence approach that is faster at finding what’s known as “magnetic shadows” in a fusion vessel: “safe havens protected from the intense heat of the plasma.”

Employees at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina have demonstrated their resourcefulness and capabilities by implementing a newly created carrier to transport spent nuclear fuel, reducing the time needed to process the material for permanent disposal in coming years.

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 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.

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.

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.”

The Department of Energy announced on June 5 that three companies—all of which are new to the Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) voucher program—will receive vouchers to support their research on advanced fuels, materials, and sensors. The second round fiscal year 2025 vouchers will let the companies access specialized research facilities and expertise in the DOE’s national laboratory complex.

Wright

Energy Secretary Chris Wright testified before the U.S. Senate’s Energy and Water Development Subcommittee yesterday to discuss how the Department of Energy would be impacted by the president’s proposed fiscal year 2026 budget.

The meeting highlighted concerns from lawmakers about the DOE’s spending and efficiency—pointing to the rise in the department’s budget from $61 billion in FY 2021 to $160 billion last year.

Committee chair John Kennedy (R., La.) called the DOE spending pattern “unsustainable.”

“The average electricity bill . . . for the average American family over the past four years is up 28 percent. That’s the first thing they care about,” Kennedy said. “We’ve got to address it . . . and talk very specifically about what programs are working and what isn’t.”

Workers with Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management contractor Isotek have surpassed a significant milestone in the supply of medical radioisotopes, extracting more than 15 grams of rare thorium-229 through the Department of Energy’s Thorium Express Project.

In a historic photo, students gather at the Oak Ridge high school in Tennessee. (Photo: DOE)

The Tennessee legislature has approved a $3.2 million proposal to fund a monument that will honor a group of 85 black former students known as the Scarboro–Oak Ridge 85 who, with support from the Atomic Energy Commission, became the first students to enter a previously white-only public school in the southeastern United States.

"We want to make sure that Oak Ridge and the Scarboro 85 get their rightful place in the civil rights history timeline; we do not want to be left out," said John Spratling, chair of the Scarboro 85 Monument Committee.

ANS recognition: The American Nuclear Society officially recognized and honored the Scarboro 85 in 2021 by awarding the group with the inaugural Social Responsibility in the Nuclear Community Award at that year’s Annual Winter Meeting.

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.

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.

Fusion startup Type One Energy has announced the publication of a baseline physics design basis for its proposed Infinity Two stellarator fusion pilot power plant. The design basis was published in a series of seven papers in a special issue of the Journal of Plasma Physics. According to the company, the design basis realistically considers for the first time the relationship between competing requirements for plasma performance, power plant startup, construction logistics, reliability, and economics utilizing actual power plant operating experience.