ANS Executive Director/Chief Executive Officer Craig Piercy has submitted testimony on the administration’s proposed Fiscal Year 2021 Department of Energy budget to the House and Senate Appropriations subcommittees on Energy and Water Development, urging congressional appropriators to increase funding for nuclear-related programs. The testimony was submitted on March 31.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on March 24 relicensed the only uranium conversion plant in the United States, Honeywell International’s Metropolis Works.

Metropolis Works can now operate until March 24, 2060, potentially logging operations for over a century. Built in 1958 to produce uranium hexafluoride (UF6) for the U.S. government, Metropolis Works began selling UF6 on the commercial market in 1968.

Southern Company subsidiary Georgia Power announced on March 27 that the Unit 4 vessel top head has been placed, following the completion of major lifts inside the containment vessel. The milestone comes approximately one year after Unit 3’s containment vessel top was lifted into place.

The NRC approved the transfer of the reactor's license to ADP CR3 for decommissioning.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the license transfer for the Crystal River-3 nuclear power plant from Duke Energy Florida to ADP CR3, enabling active decommissioning of the shuttered nuclear power plant, the agency announced on April 1.

On March 28, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission informed the industry via letter that nuclear plant operators can apply for 60-day exemptions from the agency’s work-hour control regulations—found in 10 CFR 26.205—to address workforce issues arising from the COVID-19 public health emergency. The pandemic has compelled some operators to limit the number of employees physically present at plants to “essential” personnel.

At the end of the 1950’s the US Army was looking at its entire operational sphere to determine in what areas nuclear energy could be of benefit. While many of these are fairly well known today – for example, the small nuclear plants that were to have been installed at remote locations for powering bases like the Defense Early Warning stations – there are a few applications that remain obscure.

by Mike Little and Dale Vines, Dominion Engineering, Inc.

Now how did that get there?

Finding foreign material in your reactor system is not the beginning of a good day. Where did it come from? Did someone leave this in here or did something break? When did this happen? These are all good questions for which we need to know the answers.

More and more folks are having to essentially home-school their children or relatives’ children as this whole virus thing plays out – and they are benefiting from a tremendous effort on the part of educators everywhere as transition is made to sent-out and, increasingly, remote educational materials. I thought it might be useful to present, with commentary, some short nuclear energy videos that you could watch or use if you check down through materials or want to supplant them. (We really do have to take a moment to applaud our educators, everywhere, for what they’re facing – and the administrators as well.)

The International Atomic Energy Agency plans to provide diagnostic kits, equipment, and training in nuclear-­derived detection techniques to countries asking for assistance in tackling the worldwide spread of the coronavirus that has caused the COVID-­19 pandemic. IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi announced the plans on March 9 during his first formal address to the IAEA’s Board of Governors (see previous story).

“The IAEA is not a specialized health agency and has no role in controlling the disease,” Grossi said, “but we do have expertise and experience that help in detecting outbreaks of certain viral diseases and in diagnosing them.”

According to a statement from the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), a key hot performance test was conducted on Unit 5 of the Fuqing nuclear power plant in Fuzhou, in East China’s Fujian Province, on March 2. The CNNC said it is the world’s first nuclear power project using Hualong One technology, also known as HPR 1000, a third-­generation reactor design developed by China. A total of five nuclear power units adopting HPR 1000 technology are under construction by CNNC in China and other countries.

Rafael Mariano Grossi, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s director general, called on Iran on March 9 to cooperate immediately and fully with the IAEA and to provide prompt access to locations that it has refused to let agency inspectors visit. “The agency has identified a number of questions related to possible undeclared nuclear material and nuclear-related activities at three locations that have not been declared by Iran,” Grossi said in his first address to the IAEA’s Board of Governors since being named director general in December.

The lead test rods for the world’s first installed accident tolerant fuel (ATF) have completed a full cycle at Unit 1 of the Hatch nuclear power plant in Baxley, Ga. Southern Nuclear Operating Company operates the two-unit plant.

During a planned spring 2020 maintenance and refueling outage at Unit 1, operators transferred a sampling of the lead test rods from the reactor to the spent fuel pool. An initial inspection of the fuel in comparison to standard zirconium rods has been completed.

Three reactor developers got a boost on March 9 when they were each awarded a contract from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) to design a reactor that can fit inside a standard shipping container for military deployment. The DOD’s Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO), in partnership with the Department of Energy, proposes to build and demonstrate a 1–10 MWe reactor within four years that, if successful, could be widely deployed to support the DOD’s domestic and operational energy demands.

By Rob Weber, Projects and Proposals Manager, Central Research Laboratories

Addressing Current Problems

Bag-out operations can pose many issues to the TRU waste handling and disposal process. Among these are operator and facility safety, operational time, excess waste volume, and increased shipping costs to a waste repository.

Historically, removing hazardous waste from gloveboxes has involved using bags for primary containment. This bag-out method can prove tedious, repetitive, and time-consuming to ensure it follows all required safeguards to transfer waste without breaching containment. Layers of bags, yards of tape, and multiple filters are all added to the waste stream to transfer hazardous waste safely from the glovebox into a disposal drum.

Large-scale testing is done on the Spinionic rotating bed reactor system.

We live in a world where we are continually driven to increase efficiency while decreasing costs—to do more with less. The nuclear industry is no different. Developing innovative techniques or adapting creative ideas found in other industries can support that pursuit to reduce cost and, in this case, volumes of waste, while providing program certainty. Such actions build confidence in our industry and allow nuclear power to continue to be part of the narrative of our clean-energy future.

Dear ANS members,

As you know, the staff and I are in the midst of implementing a significant overhaul of ANS operations, as guided by the letter and spirit of ANS Change Plan 2020.

We are off to a good start. We have changed the ANS organization chart to knock down silos and bring fresh leadership to our Publications and Digital Technology Departments. We have embarked on a major overhaul of our IT infrastructure to leverage the advantages of cloud computing and significantly improve our cybersecurity posture. Our first visible improvement will be a modernized ANS website, scheduled to go live for members and the general public in a matter of weeks, followed by digital access to Nuclear News and related content this summer.

Progress is continuing, both inside our Society and in the areas we serve. The Executive Committee is committed to working with the ANS staff to implement the initiatives set forth in ANS Change Plan 2020. You may recall that our plans included an operational review of ANS headquarters. Executive Director/CEO Craig Piercy has announced organizational changes that went into effect in early February. We made some difficult decisions, but ones that will have a positive impact on our operating budget and improve the delivery of services to our members. I have tremendous confidence in the dedication of the staff and the vision of our new leaders. This has been a year of tremendous uncertainty and change, and I am grateful for the resiliency and focus of our staff.

BWX Technologies announced on March 11 that its BWXT Nuclear Operations Group (BWXT NOG) subsidiary had been awarded a contract from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to manufacture TRISO nuclear fuel to support the continued development of the Transformational Challenge Reactor (TCR). Plans to restart a TRISO production line at the company’s Lynchburg, Va., manufacturing site will be finalized to allow for production to be completed by the fall of 2020.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently identified a number of what it refers to as “apparent violations” of agency regulations at Tennessee Valley Authority nuclear facilities.

On March 2, the NRC issued TVA an Office of Investigation (OI) report, which pointed to an apparent violation of employee protection requirements at the utility’s Sequoyah nuclear plant, located near Soddy-­Daisy, Tenn. According to the report, a former Sequoyah employee had been “constructively discharged” for raising concerns from 2015 to 2018 with TVA’s Corporate Nuclear Licensing group regarding regulatory noncompliance and for expressing concerns about a chilled work environment. The former employee reportedly expressed these concerns both to TVA’s Employee Concern Program and to other employees.