The American Nuclear Society presented the Illinois Institute of Technology with a plaque last week to officially designate the Armour Research Foundation Reactor a Nuclear Historic Landmark, following the Society’s decision to confer the status onto the reactor in September 2024.

DTE Energy, the owner of Fermi nuclear power plant in Michigan, is considering an extended uprate for Unit 2 that would increase its 1,100-MW generation capacity by 150 MW.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has awarded a five-year contract worth up to $74.8 million to Independent Strategic Management Solutions for professional support services at the Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management site in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Gov. Katie Hobbs put the brakes on legislation that would have eliminated some of Arizona’s regulations and oversight of small modular reactors, technology that is largely under consideration by data centers and heavy industrial power users.

Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.

Utah-based waste management company EnergySolutions announced that it has signed a memorandum of understating with the Intermountain Power Agency and the state of Utah to explore the development of advanced nuclear power generation at the Intermountain Power Project (IPP) site near Delta, Utah.

Advanced nuclear company Oklo Inc. has new leadership for its board of directors as billionaire Sam Altman is stepping down from the position he has held since 2015. The move is meant to open new partnership opportunities with OpenAI, where Altman is CEO, and other artificial intelligence companies.

Pacific Fusion has a staff that knows its way around pulsers and inertial fusion, and an ongoing collaboration with General Atomics. Today, the two companies are announcing plans to test Pacific Fusion’s pulser-driven inertial fusion energy concept, with commercial fusion power as the goal.

“We are building a fusion machine and testing all equipment—including components and a pulser module—at our Pacific Fusion test center,” Pacific Fusion cofounder and chief technology officer Keith LeChien told Nuclear News. “GA’s engineering expertise remains an important part of our progress, and we expect this collaboration to continue through future phases of development.”

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Nuclear Plasma and Radiation Engineering (NPRE) Department announced yesterday that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved a fuel qualification methodology topical report for the high-temperature gas-cooled reactor the university wants to construct. The topical report was prepared by Ultra Safe Nuclear and submitted by UIUC to the NRC in March 2024. It describes the fuel that would be used in the microreactor that UIUC plans to host—initially containing uranium enriched to 9.9 percent U-235—and how it would be tested. The NRC issued its approval and a final safety evaluation on April 1.

Framatome announced that it has inaugurated a new workshop dedicated to the fabrication of fuel for research reactors and targets for medical isotopes at the company’s Romans-sur-Isère site in France. The workshops are part of Framatome’s CERCA division, which manufactures fuel and irradiation targets for research reactors.