NRC’s David Wright visits the Hill and more NRC news

June 26, 2025, 9:29AMNuclear News

Wright

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is in the spotlight today for three very different reasons. First, NRC Chair David Wright was on Capitol Hill yesterday for his renomination hearing in front of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee. Second, the NRC released its updated milestone schedules according to the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act (NEIMA) and the executive orders signed by President Trump last month; and third, as reported by Reuters on Tuesday, 28 former NRC officials have condemned the dismissal of Commissioner Hanson earlier this month.

Renomination: EPW Committee chair Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R., W.Va.) opened the hearing with a statement praising Wright’s experience and emphasized the urgency of stable leadership at the NRC.

“China is executing a rapid build-out of its nuclear industry,” Capito said. “The demand for clean, baseload power is skyrocketing as we position America to win the AI race.”

A look inside NIST’s work to optimize cancer treatment and radiation dosimetry

June 26, 2025, 7:10AMNuclear News
A NIST head-shaped phantom is helping researchers improve radiation dose estimates for cancer treatment. (Photo: NIST)

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.

WIPP’s SSCVS: A breath of fresh air

June 25, 2025, 12:00PMNuclear NewsTim Gregoire
WIPP completed the commissioning of a large-scale ventilation system, known as the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System, this spring. The system will restore full ventilation to the underground repository. (Photo: DOE)

This spring, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced that it had achieved a major milestone by completing commissioning of the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System (SSCVS) facility—a new, state-of-the-art, large-scale ventilation system at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the DOE’s geologic repository for defense-related transuranic (TRU) waste in New Mexico.

Sweden’s SKB awards early contract for repository construction

June 25, 2025, 9:30AMRadwaste Solutions
Early construction work on the Forsmark repository includes an access tunnel, three vertical shafts for ventilation and a lift, a central area and main tunnels, and transport tunnels to the first repository areas. (Image: SKB)

The Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (Svensk Kärnbränslehantering AB, or SKB) has signed a collaboration agreement with the multinational construction company Implenia to build the first underground section of a deep repository for radioactive waste near Sweden’s Forsmark nuclear power plant.

DOE extends Centrus’s HALEU production contract by one year

June 25, 2025, 7:00AMNuclear News
A view of the HALEU cascade at the American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio. (Photo: Centrus Energy)

Centrus Energy has secured a contract extension from the Department of Energy to continue—for one year—its ongoing high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) production at the American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio, at an annual rate of 900 kilograms of HALEU UF6. That's the same amount of HALEU—900 kg—that the company today announced it has delivered to the DOE, completing Phase II of its contract. According to Centrus, the contract extension, which allows the company to begin Phase III, is valued at about $110 million through June 30, 2026.

Hinkley Point C gets over $6 billion in financing from Apollo

June 24, 2025, 3:00PMNuclear News
A model of the Hinkley Point C station. (Image: UK government)

U.S.-based private capital group Apollo Global has committed £4.5 billion ($6.13 billion) in financing to EDF Energy, primarily to support the U.K.’s Hinkley Point C station. The move addresses funding needs left unmet since China General Nuclear Power Corporation—which originally planned to pay for one-third of the project—exited in 2023 amid U.K. government efforts to reduce Chinese involvement.

A Technology Leader in Neutron Measurement

June 24, 2025, 11:08AMSponsored ContentExosens

As the global energy landscape shifts toward safer, smaller, and more flexible nuclear power, Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and Generation IV technologies are at the forefront of innovation. These advanced designs pose new challenges in size, efficiency, and operating environment that traditional instrumentation and control solutions aren’t always designed to handle.

Nuclear techniques highlighted at UN Ocean Conference

June 24, 2025, 7:00AMNuclear News
IAEA director general Rafael Grossi speaks during a session on combating marine pollution. (Photo: E. McDonald/IAEA)

Plastic waste is polluting the oceans and entering the human body in the form of microplastics. According to the United Nations, without immediate action the amount of plastic finding a way into the oceans each year could reach 37 million metric tons by 2040, becoming a threat to marine and human life.

High-power electricity direct from radiation is the vision of Rads to Watts

June 23, 2025, 12:00PMNuclear News
In this artist’s concept, a notional spacecraft with a high-power plasma thruster is powered by kilowatt-level radiovoltaics. (Image: DARPA/Alan Clarke)

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.

Prepare for the 2025 Nuclear PE Exam with ANS guides

June 23, 2025, 9:30AMANS News

The next opportunity to earn professional engineer (PE) licensure in nuclear engineering is this fall, and now is the time to sign up and begin studying with the help of materials like the online module program offered by the American Nuclear Society.

MOU signed for Solo microreactor

June 23, 2025, 7:01AMNuclear News
Paragon vice president John Portillo (left) and Terra Innovatum partner and chief business development officer Giordano Morichi at the signing ceremony. (Photo: Paragon)

Paragon Energy Solutions has signed a memorandum of understanding with Terra Innovatum, a developer of micro-modular nuclear reactors, to support the design and integration of instrumentation and control systems for Terra’s Solo micro-modular reactor. Paragon is a provider of safety-related I&C systems for the nuclear energy community.

Take steps on SNF and HLW disposal

June 20, 2025, 3:08PMNuclear NewsMatt Bowen

Matt Bowen

With a new administration and Congress, it is time once again to ponder what will happen—if anything—on U.S. spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste management policy over the next few years. One element of the forthcoming discussion seems clear: The executive and legislative branches are eager to talk about recycling commercial SNF. Whatever the merits of doing so, it does not obviate the need for one or more facilities for disposal of remaining long-lived radionuclides. For that reason, making progress on U.S. disposal capabilities remains urgent, lest the associated radionuclide inventories simply be left for future generations to deal with.

In March, Rick Perry, who was secretary of energy during President Trump’s first administration, observed that during his tenure at the Department of Energy it became clear to him that any plan to move SNF “required some practical consent of the receiving state and local community.”1

West Valley completes teardown of Main Plant Process Building

June 20, 2025, 12:02PMRadwaste Solutions
Before and after demolition: (1) Workers take the “first bite” during the start of the Main Plant Process Building demolition in 2022. (2) The Fuel Receiving and Storage Facility is now visible from this vantage point following the completion of the building demolition this month. Workers have begun groundwork to install a protective cover over the Main Plant footprint. (Image: DOE)

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management and its cleanup contractor CH2M Hill BWXT West Valley (CHBWV) completed the on-time removal of the Main Plant Process Building at the West Valley Demonstration Project (WVDP) in New York. Located 35 miles south of Buffalo, the 150-acre WVDP site is home to the only commercial spent nuclear fuel reprocessing facility to operate in the United States.

DOE opens pilot program to authorize test reactors outside national labs

June 20, 2025, 9:35AMNuclear News

Details of the plan to test new reactor concepts under the Department of Energy’s authority but outside national laboratory boundaries—first outlined in one of the four executive orders on nuclear energy released on May 23—were just released in a request for applications issued by the DOE.

West Virginia couple use ANS Geiger counters for nuclear education

June 20, 2025, 7:10AMNuclear News
Ann Gibeaut (center row, second from left), Tim Adkins (center row, far right), and other volunteer educators with Civil Air Patrol cadets. (Photo: Boone Composite Squadron, Civil Air Patrol)

Husband-and-wife team Timothy Adkins and Ann Gibeaut are using Geiger counters supplied by the American Nuclear Society to educate young people in West Virginia about nuclear science and ionizing radiation. In 2022, ANS donated some old nonfunctioning Geiger counters to Tim and Ann, who recalibrated them and got them working again.