The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is holding an in-person open house on Thursday, May 15, to discuss the 2024 safety performance of the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia.

Here is a recap of industry happenings from the recent past:

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TerraPower’s Natrium reactor advances on several fronts

TerraPower has continued making aggressive progress in several areas for its under-construction Natrium Reactor Demonstration Project since the beginning of the year. Natrium is an advanced 345-MWe reactor that has liquid sodium as a coolant, improved fuel utilization, enhanced safety features, and an integrated energy storage system, allowing for a brief power output boost to 500-MWe if needed for grid resiliency. The company broke ground for its first Natrium plant in 2024 near a retiring coal plant in Kemmerer, Wyo.

The Department of Energy has announced its first round of conditional commitments to provide high-assay low-enriched uranium to five U.S. nuclear developers. According to the DOE, the delivery of HALEU will support the commercialization of advanced nuclear technologies, aiming to deliver secure, affordable, and reliable energy to Americans.

Dozens of Westinghouse employees and supply chain partners descended on Washington, D.C., last week to build legislative support for new nuclear projects.

Patrick Fragman, Westinghouse’s chief executive, said in a recent interview with Politico that the U.S. and Europe are still ideal partners on nuclear power.

Even though President Trump’s latest policy moves are straining some U.S. relations with nations, “Westinghouse stresses it’s a private company that is now Canadian-owned—and that nuclear projects function on a time scale that extends beyond politicians,” Fragman told Politico.

For the full Politico article, click here.

Prodigy Clean Energy and Lloyd’s Register have announced a collaboration to support the deployment of Prodigy’s “transportable nuclear power plants” (TNPPs) in Canada by 2030. Prodigy’s goal is to build marine-based nuclear power plants that are compatible with different end uses and reactor suppliers. What the plants would have in common is offshore siting close to an end user, which could include offshore oil and gas platforms, commercial seaports, mining operations, remote communities, and desalination plants.

Penn State and Westinghouse Electric Company are working together to site a new research reactor on Penn State’s University Park, Pa., campus: Westinghouse’s eVinci, a HALEU TRISO-fueled sodium heat-pipe reactor. Penn State has announced that it submitted a letter of intent to host and operate an eVinci reactor to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on February 28 and plans to engage with the NRC on specific siting decisions. Penn State already boasts the Breazeale reactor, which began operating in 1955 as the first licensed research reactor at a university in the United States. At 70, the Breazeale reactor is still in operation.

South Carolina public utility Santee Cooper and its partner South Carolina Electric & Gas (SCE&G) called a halt to the Summer-2 and -3 AP1000 construction project in July 2017, citing costly delays and the bankruptcy of Westinghouse. The well-chronicled legal fallout included indictments and settlements, and ultimately left Santee Cooper with the ownership of nonnuclear assets at the construction site in Jenkinsville, S.C.

Southern Nuclear was first when no one wanted to be.

The nuclear subsidiary of the century-old utility Southern Company, based in Atlanta, Ga., joined a pack of nuclear companies in the early 2000s—during what was then dubbed a “nuclear renaissance”—bullish on plans for new large nuclear facilities and adding thousands of new carbon-free megawatts to the grid.

In 2008, Southern Nuclear applied for a combined construction and operating license (COL), positioning the company to receive the first such license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2012. Also in 2008, Southern became the first U.S. company to sign an engineering, procurement, and construction contract for a Generation III+ reactor. Southern chose Westinghouse’s AP1000 pressurized water reactor, which was certified by the NRC in December 2011.

Fast forward a dozen years—which saw dozens of setbacks and hundreds of successes—and Southern Nuclear and its stakeholders celebrated the completion of Vogtle Units 3 and 4: the first new commercial nuclear power construction project completed in the U.S. in more than 30 years.

Westinghouse Electric Company announced last week that NASA and the Department of Energy have awarded the company a contract to continue developing a lunar microreactor concept for the Fission Surface Power (FSP) project.

BWXT Canada, a subsidiary of BWX Technologies, is partnering with Westinghouse Electric Company to build new nuclear projects in Canada and globally.

Westinghouse Electric Company’s eVinci Advanced Logic System (ALS) Version 2 (v2) instrument and control (I&C) platform has received approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission through a final safety evaluation report on two topical reports.

The eVinci is now the first and only microreactor with an I&C system approved by the NRC, which opens a path to autonomous operation. The approvals also allow the ALS v2 platform to be used by any reactor currently in the U.S. fleet.

Radiant Industries has announced a $100 million Series C funding round to be used primarily to complete its Kaleidos Development Unit (KDU) microreactor for testing in Idaho National Laboratory's Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments (DOME) facility within two years.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has awarded a $2.3 billion operations and site mission support services contract for the Portsmouth Paducah Project Office (PPPO) to Mission Conversion Services Alliance (MCSA), a limited liability company made up of Atkins Nuclear Secured, Westinghouse Government Services, and Jacobs Technology, with Swift & Staley and Akima Centerra Integrated Services as teaming subcontractors.

The Department of Energy announced contracts yesterday for six companies to perform high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) deconversion and to transform enriched uranium hexafluoride (UF₆) to other chemical forms, including metal or oxide, for storage before it is fabricated into fuel for advanced reactors. It amounts to a first round of contracting. “These contracts will allow selected companies to bid on work for deconversion services,” according to the DOE’s announcement, “creating strong competition and allowing DOE to select the best fit for future work.”

Westinghouse Electric Company has announced that it will create two new global business units from its Operating Plant Services business. Effective January 1, 2025, the new units will be Long-Term Operations and Outage & Maintenance Services.

Westinghouse Electric Company has completed the front-end engineering and experiment design (FEEED) for a prototype microreactor at Idaho National Laboratory, the Department of Energy recently announced. The one-fifth scale version of eVinci, Westinghouse’s 5-MWe sodium-cooled heat pipe design, is one of three reactors that could be tested at the National Reactor Innovation Center’s (NRIC) DOME test bed “as early as 2026,” the DOE said.

Westinghouse Electric Company announced today that it has signed a teaming agreement with Hyundai Engineering & Construction Company to pursue opportunities in Sweden and Finland for nuclear power plants based on Westinghouse’s AP1000 reactor technology.

China’s State Council has approved the construction of four new nuclear reactors based on Westinghouse's AP1000 technology at two Chinese power plants. China’s State Power Investment Corporation plans to build two of the reactors at its Bailong nuclear power project in Guangxi Province, where preparatory groundwork construction can now begin at the site. The other two units were approved for the Lufeng nuclear power plant, located in Guangdong Province and owned by China General Nuclear Power Corporation, where sitework has already begun.