For those who missed the recent Conference on Nuclear Training and Education: A Biennial International Forum (CONTE 2023), which was held on February 6–9 in Amelia Island, Fla., ANS hosted on March 9 an online panel discussion recapping selected highlights. The conference had the theme of “Maintaining Excellence Today—Building the Nuclear Workforce for Tomorrow!”

Four panelists summarized their CONTE presentations in the online discussion: Annaliese Piraino, instructional technologist at Energy Harbor’s Beaver Valley nuclear power plant; Sterling Parmenter, senior maintenance and technical instructor at Constellation Energy’s Nine Mile Point nuclear power plant; Lori Brady, senior director of human resources and training and development at the Nuclear Energy Institute; and David Helling, senior training advisor at Westinghouse Electric Company. The online event was moderated by Billy Wilson, senior engineer in nuclear training at Ontario Power Generation.

For more info on the CONTE meeting, visit CONTE 2023. Also available online is the recap webinar.

Manchin

Barrasso

A bipartisan group in the Senate is making another attempt to ban Russian uranium with the introduction of S. 763, the Reduce Russian Uranium Imports Act, after similar legislation introduced in the previous Congress just under one year ago by Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.) failed to advance.

Debuting March 9, the new bill is sponsored by Barrasso and Sens. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.), Jim Risch (R., Idaho), Martin Heinrich (D., N.M.), Cynthia Lummis (R., Wyo.), Chris Coons (D., Del.), and Roger Marshall (R., Kan.). Specifically, S. 763 calls for prohibiting “the importation into the United States of unirradiated low-enriched uranium that is produced in the Russian Federation or by a Russian entity.”

NuScale Power, the Portland, Ore.–based small modular reactor developer, announced last week that it has placed the first upper reactor pressure vessel (RPV) long-lead material (LLM) production order with South Korea’s Doosan Enerbility.

“Right now, our country is deficient in nearly every aspect of the fuel cycle. This must change and it must change quickly,” said Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.V.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources (ENR), as he opened a Full Committee Hearing to Examine the Nuclear Fuel Cycle on March 9. “Whether it is uranium mining, milling, conversion, enrichment, nuclear fuel fabrication, power generation, or nuclear waste storage and disposal, there is much work to be done, starting with conversion and enrichment. Simply put, Russia dominates the global market, representing nearly half of the international capacity for both processes.”

Proponents of Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant received the heartening news on March 2 that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had granted a “timely renewal” exemption to allow the plant to continue operating while its new license renewal application was under review. The exemption came after the NRC denied in January plant owner Pacific Gas & Electric’s request for the agency to resume review of its original license renewal application.

X-energy, the Rockville, Md.–based small modular reactor developer, has announced its plan to open the first Xe-100 reactor fleet management, monitoring, and training facility—the Plant Support Center–East (PCSE)—in the fourth quarter of this year.

A nuclear-powered hydrogen production facility has commenced operation at Constellation Energy’s Nine Mile Point plant, the company announced this week. The facility is the first of its kind in the United States to generate hydrogen using nuclear power, courtesy of the New York plant’s two boiling water reactors, the 620-MWe Unit 1 and 1,287-MWe Unit 2.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has accepted for review Northern States Power Company’s subsequent license renewal application for its Monticello nuclear power plant. A notice of the agency’s decision, along with information on requests for a hearing in the matter, was published in the March 3 Federal Register.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced last Friday the issuance of 2022 assessment letters to operators of the nation’s commercial nuclear reactors, noting that of the 93 units in the agency’s Reactor Oversight Process, 87 “reached the highest performance category in safety and security,” known as Licensee Response.

Women including Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Lise Meitner, Chien-Shiung Wu, and Katharine Way were key pioneers in nuclear science and technology, but today the visibility of women in the nuclear sector remains low. Women make up just one-quarter of people employed in the nuclear sector, and for STEM positions in that field specifically, they make up just one-fifth of the workforce. About 8,000 of those women responded to an a survey from the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, and their responses have been captured in Gender Balance in the Nuclear Sector, a new report from the OECD NEA.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has published a proposed rule that would update its generic environmental impact statement for license renewal of nuclear plants (LR GEIS).

Texas-based Vistra Corporation, owner of the Comanche Peak nuclear plant, has announced a $3.43 billion deal to acquire Energy Harbor, the Ohio-based owner and operator of the Beaver Valley, Davis-Besse, and Perry nuclear facilities.

The Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory set a world record for accelerator-driven neutron research when its linear accelerator reached an operating power of 1.55 MW, improving on the facility’s original design capability of 1.4 MW. That higher power means more neutrons for researchers who use the facility for neutron scattering research to reach materials science advances, ORNL announced recently.

Unit 3 at the Vogtle nuclear power plant has achieved initial criticality, Georgia Power announced yesterday. A key milestone on the way to the reactor’s commercial operation, initial criticality demonstrates that operators have safely started, for the first time, the nuclear reaction inside the unit. (Fuel loading at Vogtle-3 began last October.)

Here is a recap of industry happenings over the past month:

ADVANCED REACTOR MARKETPLACE

INFUSE program funds 10 private-public projects

As part of the Department of Energy Office of Science’s Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE) program, $2.3 million in funding is being awarded to 10 projects that pair private industry with national laboratories for purposes of fusion energy development. The projects are being led by researchers at seven companies: Commonwealth Fusion Systems in Cambridge, Mass.; Energy Driven Technologies in Champaign, Ill.; Focused Energy in Austin, Texas; General Atomics in San Diego, Calif.; Princeton Stellarators in Princeton, N.J.; Tokamak Energy in Bruceton Mills, W.Va.; and Type One Energy Group in Madison, Wis. Through the INFUSE funding, these companies gain access to the expertise of the national labs as they conduct research into fusion energy systems. Each award provides between $50,000 and $500,000 for a one- to two-year project, with a 20 percent cost share for the industry partners.

Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter (R., Ga.)—a cosponsor of a quartet of pronuclear bills from House colleague Rep. Byron Donalds (R., Fla.)—recently reintroduced his own legislation in support of the U.S. nuclear sector: the Global Nuclear Energy Assessment and Cooperation Act (H.R. 995). Joining Carter again as original cosponsor is Rep. Scott Peters (D., Calif.).

Ivaylo Ivanov (left), member of Kozloduy NPP-Newbuilds’ board of directors, and Elias Gedeon, senior vice president for Westinghouse Energy Systems, complete the signing of an MOU for Westinghouse AP1000 technology. (Photo: Westinghouse)

Continuing to move forward with its ambitions in Central and Eastern Europe, Westinghouse Electric Company last week signed a memorandum of understanding with Kozloduy NPP–Newbuilds (KNPP-NB), establishing a working group to initiate planning for the potential deployment of one or more of the American company’s AP1000 reactors at Bulgaria’s Kozloduy nuclear power plant.

KNPP-NB was established in 2012 to commission new nuclear power capacity at Kozloduy.

The working group, according to a March 2 Westinghouse announcement, will also evaluate regulatory, licensing, and design bases to ensure compliance with applicable regulations, as well as a streamlined execution path to enable Bulgaria to achieve its nuclear energy goals.

Walker

A bipartisan effort in the Illinois General Assembly to repeal the state’s decades-old prohibition on new nuclear plant construction made some progress this week when the House Public Utilities Committee voted 18–3 to advance a bill lifting the ban.

Introduced on January 12 by Rep. Mark Walker (D., 53rd Dist.)—who sponsored identical legislation last year—H.B. 1079 would delete language in the Illinois Public Utilities Act that prohibits nuclear plant construction in the state “until the director of the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency finds that the United States government, through its authorized agency, has identified and approved a demonstrable technology or means for the disposal of high-level nuclear waste, or until such construction has been specifically approved by a statute enacted by the General Assembly.” The bill has 31 cosponsors—four Democrats and 27 Republicans.

Lightbridge Corporation, which is continuing to work closely with national laboratories on the manufacture and testing of its metallic fuel rod designs for light water reactors, just announced the results of an investigation on the casting process for molten uranium and zirconium with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory under the Department of Energy’s Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) program.

Dow and X-energy announced today that they have signed a joint development agreement (JDA) to demonstrate the first grid-scale advanced nuclear reactor at an industrial site in North America within a decade. As part of the agreement, Dow is now a subawardee under X-energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP) Cooperative Agreement with the Department of Energy.