Alaina Cummings has been selected by the American Nuclear Society and American Society of Mechanical Engineers to receive the 2026 ANS/ASME Barry Sloane Memorial Undergraduate Scholarship.

A clearer definition of what constitutes high-level radioactive waste could save the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management “tens of billions of dollars” in waste management costs and accelerate its cleanup schedule by decades, according to a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

DOE-EM’s efforts to manage waste resulting from legacy spent nuclear fuel reprocessing have been hindered for decades by the ambiguity of the statutory definition of HLW as laid out in the Atomic Energy Act and Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the report states. While admitting that the DOE has taken steps to overcome this ambiguity, the GAO says that the department has not fully evaluated all available opportunities to treat and dispose of waste more economically as either transuranic or low-level radioactive waste.

A diagram depicting the NRC’s regulatory structure for nuclear criticality safety. (Image: Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

The American Nuclear Society’s Risk-informed, Performance-based Principles and Policy Committee (RP3C) held another presentation in its monthly Community of Practice (CoP) series last month. RP3C chair Steven Krahn opened the meeting with brief introductory remarks about the importance of risk-informed, performance based (RIPB) decision-making and the need for new approaches to nuclear design that go beyond conventional and deterministic methods.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved a significant overhaul of its Reactor Oversight Process (ROP) baseline inspection program that stresses a leaner, more risk-focused inspection process.

This adoption comes just over a month after NRC officials published their findings on the proposed ROP changes. The changes would reduce the number of hours spent annually on direct inspections at U.S. nuclear power plants by 38 percent.

The governments of Kentucky and McCracken County have granted preliminary approval to Global Laser Enrichment for a comprehensive incentive package to support the development of the North Carolina–based company’s planned Paducah Laser Enrichment Facility in the western part of the state. The performance-based incentive package would provide as much as $98.9 million in tax incentives and other economic incentives—provided that GLE reaches the required thresholds in investments and job creation.

In addition, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, has completed a draft environmental impact statement (EIS) in response to GLE’s application to construct and operate the PLEF. Members of the public can submit comments on the draft EIS by May 11 for consideration by the NRC.

The U.S. Air Force wants to hear from companies that could be interested in deploying small nuclear reactors at its bases.

The request for information posted Wednesday intends to assist the federal government in identifying potential developers and “understanding the company’s capability to design, license, fuel, construct, and deploy Small, Micro, or Modular Reactor (SMR) technologies in compliance with applicable regulatory, safety, environmental, and security requirements.”

The nuclear industry has long recognized a shortage of both skilled craft labor and professional talent. As global demand for reliable energy continues to rise—across the United States and internationally—that need has not only increased but has become critical.” This is a truth that nuclear industry consultant Jeffery P. Hawkins understands, and it is why he developed a program called Interns to Industry. The former Fluor Corporation executive said that “there has been a deficit of qualified resources in the nuclear industry, and this is forecasted to be even more so in the future, so I am working with various universities to determine how to customize their curriculums to fit the forecasted needs of the industry.”

Designed for 40 years but built to last far longer, Switzerland’s nuclear power plants have all entered long-term operation. Yet age alone says little about safety or performance. Through continuous upgrades, strict regulatory oversight, and extensive aging management, the country’s reactors are being prepared for decades of continued operation, in line with international practice.

Focused Energy and the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) have established a $6.9 million partnership agreement to collaborate on fundamental challenges in inertial fusion energy.

Microsoft and Nvidia have formed an “AI for nuclear” partnership intended to streamline the permitting, design, and operations of nuclear power plant facilities, and highlighted the collaboration at CERAWeek 2026 in Houston earlier this week.

Microsoft said in an announcement that the collaboration will build a “connected, AI-powered foundation” of AI tools that energy developers will be able to use to make work “repeatable, traceable, secure, and predictable,” all the while reducing work timelines and maintaining safety.

The nomination period for the 2026 Nuclear News 40 Under 40 list is now open. The list aims to highlight people in the nuclear community who are making significant, early-career achievements. All nominations must be submitted online by 11:59 p.m. (CDT) on May 1, 2026.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has launched a new coordinated research project (CRP) aimed at creating a database of polymer-radiation interactions in the next five years with the long-term goal of using the database to enable machine learning–based predictive models.

Radiation-induced modifications are widely applicable across a range of fields including healthcare, agriculture, and environmental applications, and exposure to radiation is a major factor when considering materials used at nuclear power plants.

The University of Missouri Research Reactor (MURR) has commenced production of gadolinium-153, a radioisotope used in medical imaging applications, as announced by the Department of Energy’s Office of Isotope R&D Production (IRP) and the university earlier this week. That makes MURR the only domestic supplier of Gd-153 and one of two suppliers in the world.

Waste disposal technology company Deep Isolation Nuclear has claimed that results of a study it conducted with reactor developer Oklo demonstrate that deep borehole disposal could be an option for disposing of high-level radioactive waste generated from the recycling of advanced reactor fuel.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has finalized its new regulatory framework for advanced reactors that officials believe will accelerate, simplify, and reduce burdens in the new reactor licensing process.

The final rule arrives more than a year ahead of an end-of-2027 deadline set in the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act (NEIMA), the 2019 law that formally directed the NRC to develop a new, technology-inclusive regulatory approach. The resulting rule—10 CFR Part 53, “Risk-Informed, Technology-Inclusive Regulatory Framework for Advanced Reactors”—is commonly referred to as Part 53.

Yesterday NASA announced a series of initiatives, including plans to launch a nuclear electric propulsion spacecraft to Mars in December 2028 and a three-phase plan to establish a lunar base incorporating nuclear-driven heat and power.

Coinciding with the March 19 White House meeting between President Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae, the Department of Commerce announced three new energy deals as part of a Japan-U.S. Strategic Investment initiative. Two of the deals involve the construction of natural gas generation facilities. The third, with an estimated value of as much as $40 billion, involves the construction of GE Vernova Hitachi (GVH) BWRX-300 small modular reactors in Tennessee and Alabama.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has said that more than half of all thefts of nuclear and other radioactive material reported to the agency’s Incident and Trafficking Database (ITDB) since 1993 occurred during authorized transport, with the share rising to nearly 70 percent in the past decade. The ITDB covers incidents involving nuclear material, radioisotopes, and radioactively contaminated material.

During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.

In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.