Nuclear News

Small modular reactor firm X-energy and Energy Northwest, owner and operator of the Columbia nuclear power plant in Richland, Wash., announced yesterday the signing of a joint development agreement (JDA) for up to 12 Xe-100 SMRs in central Washington, capable of generating up to a total of 960 MWe.

The JDA defines and details the scope, location, and schedule under which the commercial development of the project will move forward, the companies said, adding that they will also work together to determine the best approaches to licensing and regulatory matters, as well as the project delivery model. Currently, the Xe-100 project is expected to be developed at a site adjacent to the Columbia facility, with the first module coming on line by 2030.

The Department of Energy recently shipped half a kilogram of plutonium oxide pellets from Oak Ridge National Laboratory to Los Alamos National Laboratory, the agency announced July 18, marking the largest such shipment since the DOE restarted domestic plutonium-238 production over a decade ago.

National Nuclear Security Administration administrator Jill Hruby and deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation Corey Hinderstein visited the country of Georgia in southeastern Europe last month to discuss the NNSA’s bilateral partnerships, seek areas of cooperation, and get a closer look at how nuclear security is implemented at active border crossings in the region.

Promising a “massive revival of nuclear power,” the U.K. government yesterday officially launched Great British Nuclear—an “arms-length” governmental body established to help ramp up the nation’s nuclear capacity to as much as 24 GW by 2050. Alongside, the U.K. announced a GBN-managed small modular reactor competition.

TerraPower and Centrus Energy Corp. announced on July 17 that they have signed a memorandum of understanding to “significantly expand their collaboration aimed at establishing commercial-scale, domestic production capabilities for high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU)” to supply fuel for TerraPower’s first Natrium reactor. Nearly three years ago, TerraPower first announced plans to work with Centrus to establish commercial-scale HALEU production facilities. The two companies signed a contract in 2021 for services to help expedite the commercialization of enrichment technology at Centrus’s Piketon, Ohio, facility.

Westinghouse Electric Company yesterday announced the signing of two memorandums of understanding with Slovakia’s state-owned nuclear company JAVYS regarding the potential deployment of the U.S. firm’s AP1000 reactors and AP300 small modular reactors.

Proponents of inertial fusion energy celebrated in December 2022, when researchers at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved fusion ignition by subjecting a carefully crafted diamond cryogenic sphere containing frozen deuterium-tritium fuel to NIF’s laser energy. NIF has yet to repeat the feat, in part because that facility was not designed to produce fusion energy, and ignition requires near-perfect targets. For inertial fusion energy to serve as a reliable power source, it will require swift, reliable, and economic target production.

A large, bipartisan group of Capitol Hill lawmakers last Friday wrote a letter to the members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission urging them “to carefully review and modify as necessary” the 10 CFR Part 53 draft licensing framework for advanced nuclear reactor technologies.

Human factors engineering and risk analysis are part of every instrumentation and control upgrade and new reactor plan—from design and licensing to implementation and operation—and applications continue to evolve.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has announced appointments to his Tennessee Nuclear Energy Advisory Council, established recently via executive order to help position the Volunteer State as a national leader in nuclear innovation.

The European Union agreed in July 2022 to include nuclear power in its taxonomy of environmentally sustainable economic activities. Yet as Columbia University senior research scholar Matt Bowen and research assistant Kat Guanio note in commentary published July 6 by Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, that policy decision remains “a bit of an outlier.” Despite nuclear energy’s anticipated role in achieving decarbonization, many climate finance taxonomies either explicitly exclude nuclear power or are discouragingly ambiguous.

As nuclear power plants in the United States and around the world go through license renewals to operate for up to 60 and 80 years and beyond, aging management of electrical cables takes center stage. Each nuclear power plant unit has thousands of miles of cables, many of which are critical to plant safety and reliability. The most important cables—those in safety systems or safety-related applications—are qualified according to industry standards and guidance documents for nuclear applications. These qualification methods use accelerated aging to simulate cable degradation under natural aging conditions and then subject the cable to a design-basis event simulation to establish the cable’s “qualified life.” This approach has worked well for the length of the initial plant license, but now, many cables are approaching or already are past their 40-year qualified lifespan. With license renewals allowing plants to operate beyond their original design life, the industry has undertaken a variety of research endeavors to help assess the condition of cables as they age and develop in situ testing techniques to verify that cables can continue to operate safely and reliably. For example, in 2022, we completed a multiyear project to develop aging acceptance criteria for a wide variety of condition monitoring techniques that can objectively assess the aged condition of cables while they remain installed in nuclear plants.

Crapo

Bipartisan legislation has been reintroduced in Congress to strengthen the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), improving compensation for people who were exposed to radiation as a result of working in uranium mines or living near sites of nuclear weapons testing during the Cold War. The legislation was introduced recently in the Senate by Sens. Mike Crapo (R., Idaho) and Ben Ray Luján (D., N.M.) and in the House by Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D., N.M.) and Del. James Moylan (R., Guam).

Follow-up bill: Originally introduced by Crapo in 2021, S. 2798 was put forward again to follow up on the success that Crapo, Luján, and Fernández had last year in extending the RECA program into 2024. The reintroduced bill, which added Moylan as a sponsor, would extend the program further to cover more communities with former uranium workers and “downwinders” (people who were exposed to radiation because they lived downwind from weapons testing sites). While the original legislation covered people in parts of Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, the bill will now also cover those who lived in Idaho, Colorado, New Mexico, and Guam.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) and Tokamak Energy Inc. are the two magnetic confinement tokamak fusion developers to receive a portion of the $46 million in funding announced by the Department of Energy in late May for the first 18 months of a public-private Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program aimed at developing fusion pilot plant designs and resolving related scientific and technological challenges within five to 10 years.

Jamie Coble

The nuclear power industry has the opportunity for significant advancements in the coming years, driven by the digital integration of instrumentation and controls (I&C), machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and optimized operations and maintenance (O&M) technologies. These developments are the enabling technologies that can ensure the efficiency, safety, and reliability of our future fleet of nuclear power plants, propelling the industry toward a more sustainable and intelligent future.

I&C plays a vital role in monitoring and controlling various aspects of nuclear power plants. Traditional I&C systems have relied on hardwired control circuits, but modern advancements are shifting towards digital I&C systems, also known as digital control systems (DCS). These systems offer enhanced flexibility, scalability, and reliability. They utilize advanced sensors, data acquisition systems, and distributed control algorithms to enable real-time monitoring, fault detection, and control optimization.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is seeking comments on three draft documents that would update guidance for U.S. nuclear power plant owners requesting subsequent license renewals for operating reactors.

The deadline for submitting comments is September 11.

The government of the Republic of Korea and the country’s industrial sector are teaming up to promote the development of small modular reactors. At a launch ceremony for the SMR Alliance, held July 4, the participants announced strategic plans and signed business agreements.

The energy ministries of Bulgaria and Ukraine have announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding to expand collaboration in the energy sector, including the nuclear energy sector.

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

ADVANCED REACTOR MARKETPLACE

Paragon to supply I&C for Xe-100 SMR

Paragon Energy Solutions and X-energy Reactor Company have entered into a preferred supplier agreement by which Paragon will be the exclusive worldwide supplier for three crucial instrumentation and control systems for X-energy’s Xe-100 advanced small modular reactors: the reactor protection system, post-event monitoring system, and neutron instrumentation system. The new agreement builds on an existing partnership between the two companies in the areas of critical safety mechanisms, which also includes Paragon’s HIPS FPGA system.

The European Union has selected a Westinghouse-led consortium to develop and deliver “a secure, fully European nuclear fuel supply” for Russian-designed VVER reactors in the EU and Ukraine, the U.S.-based firm announced last week.