On July 28, 2023, the Department of Energy launched its Cleanup to Clean Energy initiative, an effort to repurpose underutilized DOE-owned property—portions of which were previously used in the nation’s nuclear weapons program—into the sites of clean-energy generation.

Juno Beach, Fla.–based NextEra Energy Resources Development has been selected to enter realty negotiations for a large-scale solar electricity generation project at the DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in southeastern New Mexico as part of the department’s Cleanup to Clean Energy initiative.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced yesterday that waste processing operations have resumed at the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) at the Idaho National Laboratory Site. The resumption of operations follows the completion of two maintenance campaigns at the radioactive liquid waste treatment facility.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) expressed its confidence in the decommissioning work taking place at the damaged Three Mile Island Unit 2 during a recent meeting of the TMI-2 Community Advisory Panel (CAP). “We cannot be more pleased with the progress being made,” said Dwight Shearer, director of the DEP, during the meeting, held on September 13 in Middleton, Pa.

According to the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, two contractors at its Hanford Site in Washington state have finished a first-time relay of test glass as the site prepares to vitrify—or immobilize in glass—millions of gallons of radioactive and chemical waste from its large underground tanks.

Video: Watch an “instant replay” of the test glass relay here.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has found that Japan’s planned approach for recycling and disposing of soil and radioactive waste from decontamination activities after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident is consistent with the agency’s safety standards.

The Energy Communities Alliance (ECA), which advocates for communities adjacent to or impacted by Department of Energy sites, is asking the department to conduct an independent analysis evaluating the impacts of delaying the implementation of its statutory interpretation of high-level radioactive waste, which holds that some waste from the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel may be classified as non-HLW.

Tokyo Electric Power Company has added an English-language version of its Fuel Debris Portal Site to its website. According to the company, the portal is intended to deliver information pertaining to melted nuclear fuel debris at the Fukushima Daiichi site to the public in an easy-to-understand manner.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management will begin using drones for the first time to internally inspect radioactive liquid waste tanks at the department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Inspections were previously done using magnetic wall-crawling robots.

Finland’s waste management organization Posiva announced that it has begun a trial run of placing spent fuel canisters in the Onkalo geologic repository, which is located near the Olkiluoto nuclear power plant in southwestern Finland. No spent fuel will be disposed of during the trial run, which is expected to last several months.