The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management said that crews at its Hanford Site in Washington state are preparing for the site’s first-ever transfer of radioactive waste from one of its large underground tanks, Tank AP-106, to the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP).

All four steam generators at Germany’s Unterweser nuclear power plant have been removed from the reactor building, plant owner PreussenElektra has announced. The single-unit pressurized water reactor was shut down in 2011 as part of Germany’s decision to phase out nuclear energy. Decommissioning and dismantlement of the reactor began soon after PreussenElektra was granted a permit for the work in February 2018.

Brussels-based construction group Besix announced that is has been chosen by the Belgian agency for radioactive waste management ONDRAF/NIRAS for construction of the country’s surface disposal facility for low- and intermediate-level short-lived nuclear waste in Dessel.

A scientific mission led by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) set sail this past weekend in the Northeast Atlantic to investigate the long-term impacts of radioactive waste dumped at sea between the 1950s and 1990s.

Working with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy has revised its planned approach to remediating contaminated soil underneath the Chemical Materials Engineering Laboratory (commonly known as the 324 Building) at the Hanford Site in Washington state. The soil, which has been designated the 300-296 waste site, became contaminated as the result of a spill of highly radioactive material in the mid-1980s.

A new method has received Washington state’s approval for use at the 222-S Laboratory at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site, improving how experts analyze tank waste and providing more precise data to support safe and efficient cleanup.

Taking advantage of growing global demand for nuclear decontamination and decommissioning, South Korea’s state-run Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power hopes to enter the U.S. nuclear power plant D&D market next year, according to a report by English news site Pulse (a service of Mael Business News Korea).

Argonne National Laboratory said it has secured just over $10 million from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) for two research projects investigating the transmutation of spent nuclear fuel into less radioactive substances.

The Nuclear Waste Management Organization, which is mandated by law to develop an approach for the long-term care of Canada’s spent nuclear fuel, has begun collecting feedback from Canadians and Indigenous people to help refine its process for selecting a second deep geologic repository site.

The community of Lincolnshire in eastern England voted on June 3 to withdraw from consideration to host a deep geologic repository for high-level radioactive waste. Lincolnshire was one of three communities the U.K. government’s Nuclear Waste Services identified in January as possible hosts for a repository.