The Department of Energy Office of Environment, Health, Safety and Security (EHSS) held its annual meeting this month with the government of the Marshall Islands. The two-and-a-half-day meeting, in Honolulu, Hawaii, focused on ongoing cooperative efforts and programs related to the legacy of U.S. nuclear weapons testing from the 1940s and 1950s. The United States began cleanup operations on the islands in the 1970s.

Media outlets have been abuzz this week with news of cesium-137 contamination in Great Value (Walmart’s private-label brand) frozen shrimp, according to a Food and Drug Administration report.

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.

In an article just published by the Taking Measure blog of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Stephen Russek—who leads the Imaging Physics Project in the Magnetic Imaging Group at NIST and codirects the MRI Biomarker Measurement Service—describes his team’s work using phantom stand-ins for human tissue.

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 Hill recently published an opinion piece by Cindy Folkers and Amanda Nichols entitled “They won’t tell you these truths about nuclear energy.” Sadly, after the first sentence, their so-called truth veers into a diatribe of antiscientific fearmongering and misrepresentations.

Social media this past weekend streamed with reactionary posts following a drone strike last Friday at the site of the destroyed reactor from the 1986 Chernobyl accident. The drone—armed with a warhead—ripped a hole in the New Safe Confinement (NSC), a large structure built to prevent any radioactive release from the damaged reactor unit 4 and to protect it from any external hazard. The drone strike caused a fire that was still smoldering in places as of Monday morning, and left a hole larger than 500 square feet. Efforts continue to mitigate the consequences of the fire and extinguish isolated smouldering areas of the NSC's insulation material.

Due to damage to the external and internal cladding of the NSC's arch and main crane system equipment, the safety boundaries and operational conditions of the NSC complex have been compromised, according to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant Facebook page.

Key developments, emerging trends, challenges, and innovations in the field of health physics are the topic of a recently published article in Health Physics Journal. The authors of “The Future of Health Physics: Trends, Challenges, and Innovation,” Lekhnath Ghimire and Edward Waller, write that they hope to “foster dialogue and collaboration for the unpredictable yet exciting journey ahead” in health physics.

Kasparov

More than 80 percent of the territory that has been surveyed around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant “can be returned to agricultural production,” said Valery Kashparov, director of the Ukrainian Institute of Agricultural Radiology (UIAR) of the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine.

Kashparov’s team of researchers reported in a recent article in New Scientist the results of its radiation surveys of areas around the site of the 1986 nuclear power plant accident. The group concluded that radiation measurements on much of the land are now below levels regarded as unsafe by Ukrainian regulators.

Decades of research: Kashparov, who has been with the UIAR since 1998, has spent the past 37 years conducting research related to Chernobyl, focusing on the physical-chemical and nuclear-physical properties of radioactive fallout in the area.

When a SpaceX rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on September 10 (see video here), sending a crewed commercial mission into low Earth orbit, an experiment designed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory was onboard. Several high-purity metal samples will orbit Earth and absorb cosmic radiation for five days—including that from the Van Allen radiation belt—to help the lab answer questions about the radiation environment for manned space missions, according to a news release from PNNL.

The Manhattan Project may have begun more than 80 years ago, but it’s still in the news—and not just because of Oppenheimer’s recent haul at the Academy Awards. On March 7, the Senate passed S. 3853, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Reauthorization Act, by a vote of 69 to 30, sending the bill to the House. It’s Sen. Josh Hawley's (R., Mo.) second attempt to reauthorize the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA)—which was first enacted in 1990 to address the legacy of U.S. nuclear weapons production—before it expires in June. The bill would extend the deadline to claim compensation by five years and expand it from the dozen states now covered to include individuals exposed to radiation in certain regions of Missouri, Alaska, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

Love

The thriving gray wolf population in the Chernobyl exclusion zone (CEZ) has been the subject of recent media interest. While some sensationalist reports have referred to “mutant wolves” with “superpowers,” other news outlets have offered more sober discussions of the science behind the story.

Cara N. Love, a biologist and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, has been following the wolf population. Her research in the Chernobyl exclusion zone (CEZ) in Ukraine and Polesie State Radioecological Reserve in Belarus is helping biologists understand how nature adapts to chronic radiation exposure.

American Nuclear Society conferences always showcase the latest in nuclear, but one of the biggest attractions at this past November’s Winter Conference and Expo in Washington, D.C., was tech that is not new at all: cloud chambers. The Society is launching a new K-12 outreach effort featuring the ANS Visualizing Radiation Cloud Chamber Kit, and ANS staff were on hand to show it off.

Two teams of guest editors from Idaho National Laboratory have announced plans for special issues of the American Nuclear Society's Nuclear Science and Engineering, the nuclear community’s longest-running technical journal. Abdalla Abou Jaoude and Abderrafi M. Ougouag are leading the NSE issue Technical Challenges and Opportunities in the Development and Deployment of Microreactors, while Joseph Nielsen and Piyush Sabharwall are organizing the NSE issue Irradiation Experiments Supporting Advanced Nuclear Technologies.

Washington, D.C. – The American Nuclear Society (ANS) supports the start of Japan’s controlled release of re-treated, diluted tritium wastewater into the sea from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), which sustained damage in the aftermath of a 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

A group of researchers analyzed recent updates to the International Nuclear Workers Study (INWORKS) and published their findings—“Cancer mortality after low dose exposure to ionising radiation in workers in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States (INWORKS): cohort study”—in the journal BMJ on August 16. The multinational research team, led by David B. Richardson of the University of California–Irvine, reports “evidence of an increase in the excess relative rate of solid cancer mortality with increasing cumulative exposure to ionizing radiation at the low dose rates typically encountered by French, U.K., and U.S. nuclear workers [and] evidence in support of a linear association between protracted low dose external exposure to ionizing radiation and solid cancer mortality.”

Crapo

Bipartisan legislation has been reintroduced in Congress to strengthen the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), improving compensation for people who were exposed to radiation as a result of working in uranium mines or living near sites of nuclear weapons testing during the Cold War. The legislation was introduced recently in the Senate by Sens. Mike Crapo (R., Idaho) and Ben Ray Luján (D., N.M.) and in the House by Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D., N.M.) and Del. James Moylan (R., Guam).

Follow-up bill: Originally introduced by Crapo in 2021, S. 2798 was put forward again to follow up on the success that Crapo, Luján, and Fernández had last year in extending the RECA program into 2024. The reintroduced bill, which added Moylan as a sponsor, would extend the program further to cover more communities with former uranium workers and “downwinders” (people who were exposed to radiation because they lived downwind from weapons testing sites). While the original legislation covered people in parts of Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, the bill will now also cover those who lived in Idaho, Colorado, New Mexico, and Guam.

The latest National Nuclear Energy Public Opinion Survey conducted by Bisconti Research has found for the third year in a row that more than 75 percent of the U.S. public supports nuclear energy. In addition, approximately 70 percent of the public supports the building of additional nuclear power plants in the United States.

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed a method of using augmented reality (AR) to create accurate visual representations of ionizing radiation, and that technology has just been licensed by Teletrix, a Pittsburgh, Pa.-based firm that develops simulators to train radiological workers and radiological control technicians. ORNL announced the news on May 4.

One of the biggest challenges in the nuclear community identified by ANS in 2017 is the continuous availability of radioisotopes. Working to meet that challenge is the ANS-led Source Security Working Group (SSWG), an alliance of industry sectors—including energy, health care, and industrial radiography—that seeks to ensure continued access to radiological sources. The SSWG serves as a strong voice to protect the continued availability of radiological sources, ensuring that laws and policies are risk informed, science based, and support the highest levels of public health and safety.