The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is discontinuing its rulemaking activity, “Long-Term and Unattended Water Makeup of Spent Fuel Pools,” and denying a petition for rulemaking. The new rule, as requested by the petitioner, would have required nuclear power plant licensees to ensure that their spent nuclear fuel pools are capable of cooling and maintaining water levels during extended power outages.

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.

As part of its Test Bed Initiative (TBI) demonstration project, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management completed two shipments of treated, low-activity tank waste from the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. The approximately 2,000 gallons of TBI waste will be solidified in grout and permanently disposed of at Waste Control Specialists’ (WCS) federal disposal facility in Andrews County, Texas, and at EnergySolutions’ disposal facility in Clive, Utah.

A 1960s Electrolux vacuum cleaner was among the more unusual items workers removed from one of the world’s oldest nuclear waste stores at the United Kingdom’s Sellafield nuclear site.

An agreement signed by the state of Idaho and the U.S. Department of Energy will open the way for a single cask of high-burnup spent nuclear fuel to be shipped from Dominion Energy’s North Anna nuclear power plant in Virgina to Idaho National Laboratory for research purposes.

Nuclear energy produces about 9 percent of the world’s electricity and 19 percent of the electricity in the United States, which has 94 operating commercial nuclear reactors with a capacity of just under 97 gigawatts-electric. Each reactor replaces a portion of its nuclear fuel every 18 to 24 months. Once removed from the reactor, this spent (or used) nuclear fuel (SNF or UNF) is stored in a spent fuel pool (SFP) for a few years then transferred to dry storage.

For over a decade, the DOE’s Hanford Field Office (HFO) has been working with national laboratories, universities, and glass industry experts to establish capabilities and generate data to increase the confidence in a successful startup and transition to full-time operations at the WTP.

The cost to complete the cleanup of the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state could cost as much as $589.4 billion, according to the 2025 Hanford Lifecycle Scope, Schedule, and Cost Report, which was released by the DOE on April 15. While that estimate is $44.2 billion lower than the DOE’s 2022 estimate of $640.6 billion, a separate, low-end estimate has since grown by more than 21 percent, to $364 billion.

The life cycle report, which the DOE is legally required to issue every three years under agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Washington State Department of Ecology (Ecology), summarizes the remaining work scope, schedule, and cost estimates for the nuclear site. For more than 40 years, Hanford’s reactors produced plutonium for America’s defense program.