The University of California, through its Initiative for Fusion Energy, has awarded $8 million in multicampus research grants, in partnership with UC-managed national laboratories, to fund research aimed at accelerating progress toward fusion energy.

Hash Hashemian president@ans.org

In my August column in Nuclear News, I reflected on the importance of ANS’s annual conferences for bringing together our nuclear community at the national level. In September, after speaking at Tennessee’s Nuclear Opportunities Workshop, I focused my NN column that month on the value of state-level conferences.

Also in September, alongside ANS Executive Director/CEO Craig Piercy, I shifted my focus to another key front in nuclear collaboration, the international stage, by attending the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

The timing of the IAEA’s General Conference could not have been better; it took place the same week the U.S. and U.K. kicked off a new wave of transatlantic partnerships in the nuclear sector between both government and industry. This fortuitous overlapping gave us a timely and concrete reminder of international collaboration’s unparalleled benefits.

The General Conference was an expectedly busy event. To cover as much ground as possible, Piercy and I took turns attending either the U.S. delegation meetings with other countries or the General Assembly of the IAEA, where the American Nuclear Society has a seat among other critical nongovernmental organizations.

We listened to presentations by several of the 180 IAEA member states, including, of course, the United States. Aside from ANS, the U.S. presence at the conference included U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, NRC Chair David Wright, and DOE Assistant Secretary of Nuclear Energy Ted Garrish.

U.S. representation was further bolstered by an industry delegation that included 65 participants from 32 companies, many of whom used the opportunity to report progress on their plans for the international expansion of their nuclear fleets. Meetings of that industry delegation were coordinated by the Nuclear Energy Institute.

Aside from the main conference, Piercy and I also attended the embedded meetings of the International Nuclear Society Council. INSC exists to facilitate knowledge-sharing and collaboration between 18 different member nuclear societies from around the world.

The INSC meetings within the General Conference brought together the presidents and senior members of those societies to give presentations and explore new opportunities. I made a presentation on the state of nuclear in North America, covering the latest developments and deployments in the U.S. and Canada.

This presentation emphasized the new nuclear lift in the U.S. that is being heavily supported by the Trump administration. I recapped the four executive orders issued by President Trump in May, the recent momentum at the DOE, and how these changes are capitalizing on a broader groundswell in both industry development and public support.

I also pointed out the success of our neighbor Canada in progressing on the first water-cooled small modular reactor in North America using BWRX-300 technology, which was supplied by an American firm and international partners—a perfect symbol of the value of global nuclear collaboration.

In all, I have now represented ANS at the state, national, and international levels, gaining useful insight into the work that needs to be done at each. From this vantage point, it’s clear to me that the path forward from the country to the globe is to, above all else, keep working together and supporting each other to bring about the next age of nuclear.

It has been about three months since the Department of Energy named 10 companies for its new Reactor Pilot Program, which maps out how the DOE would meet the goal announced in May by Executive Order 14301 of having three reactors achieve criticality by July 4, 2026.

Mike Kramer has a background in finance, not engineering, but a combined 20 years at Exelon and Constellation and a key role in the deals that have Meta and Microsoft buying power from Constellation’s Clinton and Crane sites have made him something of a nuclear expert.

Kramer spoke with Nuclear News staff writer Susan Gallier in late August, just after a visit to Clinton in central Illinois to celebrate a power purchase agreement (PPA) with Meta that closed in June. As Constellation’s vice president for data economy strategy, Kramer was part of the deal-making—not just the celebration.

Hawthorne, Calif.–based reactor start-up Valar Atomics recently announced that it has raised $130 million in its Series A funding round, led by venture capital groups Snowpoint, Day One, and Dream.

Canada’s Fusion Fuel Cycles Inc. (FFC), a joint venture between Canadian Nuclear Laboratories and Japan’s Kyoto Fusioneering, announced that it has officially entered the construction phase of its flagship project, the Unique Integrated Testing Facility (UNITY-2), at CNL’s Chalk River Laboratories in Ontario.

The Department of Energy’s Idaho Operations Office has approved the Nuclear Safety Design Agreement (NSDA) for Oklo Inc.’s Aurora Fuel Fabrication Facility (A3F) at Idaho National Laboratory. The A3F is being built to fabricate fuel assemblies for Oklo’s Aurora Powerhouse, a liquid metal–cooled, metal-fueled fast reactor with a maximum power of 75 MWe.

Advanced reactor and fuel developer X-energy has officially begun confirmatory irradiation testing at Idaho National Laboratory on its TRISO-X fuel. The testing, which is taking place over the course of the next 13 months, will evaluate the fuel across a variety of operating scenarios and—if all goes according to plan—will be instrumental in qualifying it for commercial use.

At the American Nuclear Society’s Winter Conference & Expo, leaders of advanced reactor start-ups Radiant Industries, Oklo, and Valar Atomics praised the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program, in which the companies are participating. The program aims to get at least three reactors on line by July 4, 2026.

BWX Technologies and Purdue University have signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on research focused on next-generation nuclear technologies, including small modular reactors and microreactors.