President Trump is in Japan today, with a visit with new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on the agenda. Takaichi, who took office just last week as Japan’s first female prime minister, has already spoken in favor of nuclear energy and of accelerating the restart of Japan’s long-shuttered power reactors, as Reuters and others have reported. Much of the uranium to power those reactors will be enriched at Japan’s lone enrichment facility—part of Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd.’s Rokkasho fuel complex—which accepted its first delivery of fresh uranium hexafluoride (UF₆) in 11 years earlier this month.

Two bills were introduced in the last several weeks aiming to address nuclear power at the end of life—decommissioning plants and recycling used fuel.

The Department of Energy has a plan for private companies to “dispose of surplus plutonium”—about 19.7 metric tons in both oxide and metal forms—by “making the materials available for advanced nuclear technologies.” A Surplus Plutonium Utilization Program request for applications (RFA) issued October 21 describes the plutonium on offer, and the “thresholds” prospective applicants must meet.

Idaho National Laboratory is playing a key role in helping the U.S. Department of Energy meet near-­term needs by recovering HALEU from federal inventories, providing critical support to help lay the foundation for a future commercial HALEU supply chain. INL also supports coordination of broader DOE efforts, from material recovery at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina to commercial enrichment initiatives.

The board of directors of South Carolina’s state-owned utility Santee Cooper voted today to approve the proposal from Brookfield Asset Management to complete two new AP1000 power reactors at the V.C. Summer site in Jenkinsville, S.C.

TerraPower announced that the final environmental impact statement for its Natrium small modular reactor has been completed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The Hallam nuclear power plant, about 25 miles southwest of Lincoln, Neb., was an important part of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Reactor Power Demonstration Program. But in the end, it operated for only 6,271 hours and generated about 192.5 million kilowatt-hours of electric power during its short, 15-month life.

Four nominees to serve on the Tennessee Valley Authority Board of Directors told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that they support the build-out of new advanced nuclear reactors to meet the increased energy demand being shouldered by the country’s largest public utility.

The Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan were the subject of two different announcements yesterday about new nuclear developments.

Google DeepMind—Google’s artificial intelligence development subsidiary—recently announced a new partnership with fusion start-up Commonwealth Fusion Systems. The goal of this collaboration is to leverage AI to both advance plasma simulation and discover novel control strategies, ultimately accelerating CFS’s timeline to deliver commercial fusion to the grid.