The Supreme Court voted 6–3 against Texas and a group of landowners today in a case involving the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing of a consolidated interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel, reversing a decision by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to grant the state and landowners Fasken Land and Minerals (Fasken) standing to challenge the license.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management said that crews at its Hanford Site in Washington state are preparing for the site’s first-ever transfer of radioactive waste from one of its large underground tanks, Tank AP-106, to the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP).
Brussels-based construction group Besix announced that is has been chosen by the Belgian agency for radioactive waste management ONDRAF/NIRAS for construction of the country’s surface disposal facility for low- and intermediate-level short-lived nuclear waste in Dessel.
A scientific mission led by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) set sail this past weekend in the Northeast Atlantic to investigate the long-term impacts of radioactive waste dumped at sea between the 1950s and 1990s.
Working with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy has revised its planned approach to remediating contaminated soil underneath the Chemical Materials Engineering Laboratory (commonly known as the 324 Building) at the Hanford Site in Washington state. The soil, which has been designated the 300-296 waste site, became contaminated as the result of a spill of highly radioactive material in the mid-1980s.
Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org
The title for this year’s waste management issue of Nuclear News is, in my opinion, the perfect framing to consider spent fuel and waste management as we know it now and how we imagine it could look in the future. So, let’s break it down.
What really is “today’s challenge”? It’s certainly not safety. Since 1955, we have conducted more than 2,500 cask shipments without a single radiological release or incidence of harm to a member of the public. Despite what antinuclear evangelists (in dwindling numbers) might shriek, the industry’s record of storing and transporting used fuel is unassailable.
The lack of progress on a geologic repository isn’t necessarily a challenge to new nuclear development. We already have systems capable of storing used fuel assemblies for more than a century, proven technology with no moving parts.
A new method has received Washington state’s approval for use at the 222-S Laboratory at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site, improving how experts analyze tank waste and providing more precise data to support safe and efficient cleanup.
Studsvik AB has completed construction of the new inDRUM Demonstration Facility outside of Nykoping, Sweden. We can now demonstrate how the inDRUM technology will process a wide range of problematic and legacy wastes through the removal of all liquids, organics and other materials, resulting in a stable and reduced volume product that can be disposed of in a suitable repository.
The Nuclear Waste Management Organization, which is mandated by law to develop an approach for the long-term care of Canada’s spent nuclear fuel, has begun collecting feedback from Canadians and Indigenous people to help refine its process for selecting a second deep geologic repository site.
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At COP28, held in Dubai in 2023, a clear consensus emerged: Nuclear energy must be a cornerstone of the global clean energy transition. With electricity demand projected to soar as we decarbonize not just power but also industry, transport, and heat, the case for new nuclear is compelling. More than 20 countries committed to tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050. In the United States alone, the Department of Energy forecasts that the country’s current nuclear capacity could more than triple, adding 200 GW of new nuclear to the existing 95 GW by mid-century.
The community of Lincolnshire in eastern England voted on June 3 to withdraw from consideration to host a deep geologic repository for high-level radioactive waste. Lincolnshire was one of three communities the U.K. government’s Nuclear Waste Services identified in January as possible hosts for a repository.
Gierszewski
In late 2024, Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization announced the selection of a site in northwestern Ontario for its deep geological repository for the country’s used nuclear fuel.
This is a major step in a plan that was first laid out in 2010. From the beginning, the plan had been clear that any selected site must be technically safe, must be accessible for fuel transportation, and must have informed and willing host communities.
By 2020, potential sites had been narrowed from an initial set of 22 communities that had indicated interest in learning more down to two specific sites.
My primary involvement was on the technical safety side. We wanted to know that we could safely build and operate the repository at the chosen site.
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Tokyo Electric Power Company has released the results of its initial analysis of a sample of nuclear fuel debris from Unit 2 of Japan’s damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The sample, which measured around 5mm by 4mm and totaled 0.187 grams, was taken from the floor of the reactor pedestal during a second trial removal of fuel debris conducted in April.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced that it has introduced waste simulant chemicals to the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) as part of the cold commissioning testing of the plant’s Low-Activity Waste Facility.
A milestone has been reached at the Department of Energy’s Paducah Site when work crews successfully fabricated valves from old equipment and installed them on 137 specialized cylinders. This action will enable future work crews to transform depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) stored inside the cylinders into depleted uranium oxide, a stable chemical form suitable for reuse, storage or disposal.
Nuclear waste disposal technology company Deep Isolation announced it has successfully completed Project PUCK, a government-funded initiative to demonstrate the feasibility and potential commercial readiness of its Universal Canister System (UCS) to manage TRISO spent nuclear fuel.
Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization has selected five companies it is to work with to design and plan the organization’s proposed deep geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel. As the owner of the project, the NWMO will be working with WSP Canada, Peter Kiewit Sons (Kiewit), Hatch Ltd., Thyssen Mining Construction of Canada, and Kinectrics.
NAC International has announced that it has received certification from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its new high-capacity Volunteer packaging system for transporting nonfissile or fissile-exempt radioactive materials.