Munn

Nuclear engineer and longtime ANS member Wanda Munn died on July 23 at the age of 93. Described as a “trailblazer for women [and] an outspoken advocate for the peaceful use of nuclear technology” in her Tri-City (Wash.) Herald obituary, Munn followed a unique path to her nuclear engineering career. She did not get her degree until she was 46, and she subsequently spent 18 years working on systems design, construction, and operation of the Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF) reactor for Westinghouse at the Hanford nuclear site in eastern Washington state.

Nontraditional student: Munn was born in 1931. She graduated high school early, at age 16, and started to pursue a medical degree. However, those plans changed when she married at age 18. By her early 40s, she was divorced and working as a secretary in a university nuclear engineering department when she decided to return to school to get a nuclear engineering degree.

The American Nuclear Society’s Risk-informed, Performance-based Principles and Policy Committee (RP3C) has held another presentation in its monthly Community of Practice (CoP) series. Former RP3C chair N. Prasad Kadambi opened the June 27 meeting with brief introductory remarks about the RP3C and the need for new approaches to nuclear design that go beyond conventional and deterministic methods. He then welcomed this month’s speaker: Tim Sande, a senior manager responsible for probabilistic risk assessments (PRA) and risk-informed engineering at Enercon, who presented “A Risk-Informed Framework for Managing Nuclear Facility Security Risks.”

Watch the full webinar here.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has made three recent announcements regarding new developments in the nuclear energy industry:

The Department of Energy’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (MDF) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in partnership with Kairos Power and Barnard Construction, has successfully developed and validated large-scale, 3D-printed polymer composite forms for casting complex concrete structures.

The test took place at Kairos Power’s Oak Ridge, Tenn., campus, where the Hermes Low-Power Demonstration Reactor is currently under construction.

See a video of construction activity here.

The Palisades nuclear power plant has been formally transitioned from decommissioning status to holding an operating license following the completion of an extensive technical review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It’s a historic move; before this, no U.S. nuclear plant had ever made the transition from shut down to approved for restart.

Editor's note: This article has was originally published in November 2023. It has been updated with new information as of June 2025.

Outside my office, there is a display case filled with rock samples from all over the world. It contains a disk of translucent, orange salt from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.; a core of white-and-bronze gneiss from the site of the future deep geologic repository in Eurajoki, Finland; several angular chunks of fine-grained, gray claystone from the underground research laboratory at Bure, France; and a piece of coarse-grained granite from the underground research tunnel in Daejeon, South Korea.

The United States has tight new deadlines—18 months, max—for licensing commercial reactor designs. The Department of Energy is marshaling the nuclear expertise and high-performance computing assets of its national laboratories, in partnership with private tech companies, to develop generative AI tools and large-scale simulations that could help get nuclear reactor designs through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing process—or the DOE’s own reactor pilot program. “Accelerate” and “streamline” are the verbs of choice in recent announcements from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory, as they describe plans with Atomic Canyon, Microsoft, and Amazon.

The OECD Nuclear Energy Agency has published the third edition of the NEA Small Modular Reactor Dashboard, a comprehensive global review of SMR technology that defines criteria for assessing progress in the development of these advanced reactors. The assessments are based on six dimensions of readiness: licensing, siting, financing, supply chain, engagement, and fuel.

At the end of his July 15 speech at the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, President Trump promised that “a lot more [was] going to be announced in the coming week” for the energy and AI sectors.

A research team led by Canadian Nuclear Laboratories is studying a type of high-entropy alloy (HEA) that seems to withstand a cascade-involved irradiation environment at elevated temperatures better than stainless steel exposed to similar conditions. In a paper published in the Journal of Nuclear Materials, the researchers describe an HEA made of chromium, iron, manganese, and nickel (CrFeMnNi) that has the potential to improve the safety and functionality of nuclear reactors, as well as of spacecraft.