Two U.S. House committees spent Wednesday broaching the subject of new nuclear reactors and moving forward several bills on nuclear permitting reform. The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee’s energy subcommittee held a hearing titled “Powering the Nuclear Renaissance: Accelerating U.S. Leadership in Advanced Nuclear Reactors.” Meanwhile, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce advanced six nuclear permitting reform bills.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists have collaborated with A.J. Tuck Company to develop a new manufacturing approach for use with the hot isostatic pressing (HIP) technique. The hybrid approach combines 3D printing and electroforming to produce so-called HIP cans used to form metal parts from powder materials, aiming to simplify the production of critical reactor components.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory have announced they will collaborate to help industry develop a process for wire arc 3D printing of industrial pressure vessels used for nuclear energy and chemical processing.

“By working with industry to demonstrate, validate, and qualify advanced manufacturing technologies, we can reduce risk, accelerate deployment, and strengthen the domestic supply chains essential to America’s energy future,” said Robert Wagner, ORNL associate laboratory director for energy science and technology.

A new analytical laboratory at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been officially opened by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management and its contractor Isotek Systems. The state-of-the-art lab, located in Building 2026, is being used to speed up the high-priority cleanup of ORNL’s uranium-233 inventory and accelerate the delivery of actinium-225 to facilities that use the radioisotope in research and for potential treatment of patients with cancer.

Yesterday, Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced that the Department of Energy has committed funding to develop a fusion breeding blanket test facility at the lab in partnership with Kyoto Fusioneering, and the company announced it will be relocating its U.S. headquarters to Oak Ridge, Tenn., with support from the state of Tennessee’s Nuclear Energy Supply Chain Investment Fund.

The East Tennessee Economic Council’s Nuclear Opportunities Workshop opened yesterday morning at the Knoxville Convention Center, drawing registrants from around the country, and will close later today following a packed lineup of policy and industry leaders.

Researchers have reported using a combination of quantum and classical computing to calculate chemistry connected to tritium speciation in a FLiBe—lithium fluoride and beryllium fluoride—molten salt blanket, demonstrating a promising direction for unlocking tritium breeding in fusion machines.

Having completed deactivation work, the Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) is set to begin demolition in July of a cluster of highly contaminated buildings at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced this week.

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management and cleanup contractor United Cleanup Oak Ridge have surpassed their first-year target for processing legacy oxide waste at the site’s Transuranic Waste Processing Center (TWPC), reaching the milestone four months ahead of schedule.

On June 3, Brandon Williams, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, was at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to break ground on the Advanced Testbed and Operations Learning Laboratory (ATOLL).

The planned 21,000-square-foot facility, which is scheduled to be completed in mid-2028, will play an important role in the development of workforce expertise and capabilities aimed at monitoring foreign weapons-grade uranium production activities.

The American Nuclear Society journal Fusion Science and Technology (FS&T) has named a new technical editor: Kathryn McCarthy of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The announcement came during the opening plenary at this week’s ANS Annual Conference in Denver, Colo. McCarthy’s term begins on July 1.

On Tuesday, during Mark Peters’s last days as the American Nuclear Society’s vice president/president-elect before assuming the presidency on June 4, he sat down with ANS CEO Craig Piercy for a Fireside Chat at the Annual Conference.

The MITRE CEO weighed in on his career path, what excites and worries him about the resurgence of nuclear energy, and juggling work-life balance with his new duties as ANS’s 72nd president.

“It’s going to be a lot of fun. It’s an important year,” he told Piercy.

Researchers from the University of Michigan and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have found that predictions of helium generation rates through neutron transmutation in fission and fusion reactors vary widely and include dependencies on the choice of nuclear data library and calculation method.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced the completion of a set of experiments measuring the viscosity and thermal conductivity of several uranium-bearing molten salts, filling in gaps that could help with the development of molten salt reactors.

A comparison of real SEM tungsten microstructures (left column) with machine learning–generated synthetic microstructures (right) for different values of the model setting parameters. Adjusting the model setting controls how diverse or sharp the synthetic microstructures appear. (Image: ORNL, DOE)

Researchers have developed a model to generate images that serve as synthetic data close-ups of tungsten surfaces under fusion reactor conditions.

Tungsten is a top-choice material for plasma-facing components (PFCs) in fusion machines, so understanding tungsten’s performance is critical to the safety and longevity of component designs.

The Department of Energy’s Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) has recently awarded three second-round fiscal year 2026 vouchers to support the development of advanced nuclear technologies. Each company will get access to specific capabilities and expertise in the DOE’s national laboratory complex—in this round of awards both Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory are named—and will be responsible for a minimum 20 percent cost share, which can be an in-kind contribution.

A diagram depicting the NRC’s regulatory structure for nuclear criticality safety. (Image: Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

The American Nuclear Society’s Risk-informed, Performance-based Principles and Policy Committee (RP3C) held another presentation in its monthly Community of Practice (CoP) series last month. RP3C chair Steven Krahn opened the meeting with brief introductory remarks about the importance of risk-informed, performance based (RIPB) decision-making and the need for new approaches to nuclear design that go beyond conventional and deterministic methods.

A memorandum of understanding has been signed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS) with the objective of working together on advanced ceramic matrix composite materials for applications in extreme environments. Materials that can withstand extreme temperatures, radiation, corrosion, and mechanical stress are required in aerospace, defense, energy, and other sectors.

According to the agreement, the San Diego–based GA-EMS will use resources from ORNL’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility to develop “scalable, efficient manufacturing techniques for extreme environment materials including precursors, fibers, composites, and coatings utilized in carbon/carbon (C/C), carbon/silicon carbide (C/SiC), and SiC/SiC composite systems.”

The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility is leading research supported by two Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) grants aimed at developing accelerator technology to enable nuclear waste recycling, decreasing the half-life of spent nuclear fuel.

Both grants, totaling $8.17 million in combined funding, were awarded through the Nuclear Energy Waste Transmutation Optimized Now (NEWTON) program, which aims to enable the transmutation of nuclear fuels by funding novel technologies for improving the performance of particle generation systems.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management said it has transferred four robotic demolition machines from the department’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio to Oak Ridge, Tenn., saving the office more than $1.7 million by avoiding the purchase of new equipment.