The Center for Advanced Energy Studies (CAES) has announced the opening of the Small Modular Reactor Simulator Laboratory, featuring NuScale Power’s Energy Exploration Center, at its headquarters in Idaho Falls, Idaho. The new lab will increase CAES’s capabilities to train future scientists, engineers, and members of the energy workforce and will be used to educate the public about nuclear energy and reactor technology, according to an August 31 CAES press release.

Energy secretary Jennifer Granholm (top photo) and Norwegian minister of Trade and Industry Iselin Nybø (bottom photo, right) hold up signed versions of an MOU on the conversion of Norway’s HEU to LEU. (Photos: NNSA)

The U.S. Department of Energy and Norway’s Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Fisheries have signed a memorandum of understanding to advance a project aimed at eliminating Norway’s high-enriched uranium by downblending it to low-enriched uranium. If the project is successfully completed, Norway will become the 34th country (plus Taiwan) to be considered HEU-free.

In the downblending process, HEU is mixed with depleted or natural uranium to reduce the U-235 concentration to below 20 percent, resulting in LEU, which cannot be used to make an improvised nuclear device (aka “dirty bomb”). According to the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration, the challenge with Norway’s HEU has been that much of it is mixed with thorium, making the use of other disposition techniques more problematic.

A closer look: Signed on September 1 by U.S. energy secretary Jennifer Granholm and her Norwegian counterpart, Iselin Nybø, minister of trade and industry, the MOU calls for small-scale downblending activities to begin in 2022 using Norway’s existing infrastructure. It also paves the way for the eventual deployment of the DOE’s Mobile Melt-Consolidate system to complete the work.

The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has launched a radiological security project known as the RadSecure 100 Initiative. The initiative will focus on removing radioactive material from facilities (where feasible) and improving security at the remaining facilities located in 100 metropolitan areas throughout the United States. It includes a partnership with local law enforcement.

The initiative is being announced this week by the NNSA during the National Homeland Security Conference in Las Vegas.

A list of the 100 U.S. cities where the initiative will be enacted is available online.

Westinghouse Electric Company has entered into a cooperation agreement with the Department of Justice in connection with its role in the failed effort to build two AP1000 reactors at the Summer nuclear plant in Jenkinsville, S.C.

Over the past decade, the Department of Energy has been collecting data on nuclear power plants to help plan for the eventual removal of spent nuclear fuel from the sites, performing site evaluations to assess transportation infrastructure and the transportability of spent fuel.

With essentially no time to spare, the Illinois Senate early this morning passed a clean energy omnibus package that includes $694 million in assistance to three of the state’s financially troubled nuclear plants: Braidwood, Byron, and Dresden. The vote was 39–16. (Both the Senate and House had returned to the capital on Tuesday for a one-day special session to consider legislative redistricting.)

BlackStarTech^® Innovation Group asked one simple question:

How do we further improve the response times of our FLEX strategies?

That question led to a second question:

Can we add defense in depth to U.S. FLEX response, enhance safety margins, and strategically provide critical power rapidly and reliably in under 30 minutes for up to 30 days?

The response and resultant innovative journey led to the development of a rapidly deployable and portable battery-powered energy delivery system transforming how the nuclear industry can provide critical DC and AC power to the most essential components and control systems. The BlackStarTech methodology utilizes compact and portable power supplies to further enhance essential equipment availability, as well as providing defense in depth to FLEX and B.5.b response. The portable battery power technology provides an alternative means of electrical power delivery solutions, expanding operator flexibility and optimizing station risk reduction strategies.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it was monitoring events at three nuclear power reactors in Louisiana and Mississippi after Hurricane Ida made landfall on August 29. With winds of 150 miles per hour, the Category 4 storm left more than 1 million people without power in the two states. Ida has since weakened to a tropical storm.

Inside the ITER Assembly Hall, aided by a 20-meter-tall sector subassembly tool known as SSAT-2, the first of nine 40-degree wedge-shaped subassemblies that will make up the device’s tokamak is taking shape. On August 30, the ITER Organization announced that all the components of the first subassembly were in place on the SSAT-2. After the wings of the subassembly tool slowly close, locking two vertical coils in place around the outside of a vacuum vessel section that is already wrapped in thermal shielding, the completed subassembly will be ready for positioning in the ITER assembly pit in late October.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s draft environmental impact statement on Dominion Energy’s application for a subsequent license renewal (SLR) for North Anna’s nuclear units is now open for public comment.

Yesterday morning with about two weeks to go before the scheduled permanent closure of Illinois’s Byron nuclear power plant, state Sen. Michael Hastings (D., 19th Dist.) filed a proposal to end the state legislature’s stalemate on a clean energy package that would, among other things, provide financial aid to Byron, as well as to other endangered nuclear power facilities in the state, via a carbon mitigation credit program.

Oversight of the Vogtle nuclear new-build project will be increased if the preliminary conclusions in an August 26 Nuclear Regulatory Commission special inspection report are finalized.

Conducted from June 21 to July 2, the inspection looked into the cause and extent of construction-quality issues in the safety-related electrical cable raceway system at Vogtle-3.

The Berkeley, Calif.-based startup Deep Isolation has contracted with Slovenia’s radioactive waste management organization ARAO to conduct a feasibility study on the use of deep boreholes to dispose of the country’s spent research reactor fuel.

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have been expanding MELCOR—the severe accident modeling computer code used by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to evaluate the safety of light water reactors—to study the small modular reactors and non-light-water advanced reactors that are under development. An article published in Sandia Lab News on August 27 describes in detail how MELCOR is being expanded to work with different reactor geometries, fuel types, and coolant systems.

A federal court last week sided with the Tennessee Valley Authority in its legal dispute with Nuclear Development LLC over the proposed sale of the unfinished Bellefonte nuclear power plant. The court, however, also ordered the utility to refund millions to Nuclear Development over the aborted transaction.

The Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation has announced the startup of Unit 2 at the Barakah nuclear power plant, located in the Al Dhafra region of Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates’ capital city.

The milestone, ENEC noted in its August 27 announcement, was achieved approximately one year after the startup of the plant’s Unit 1 reactor and within five months of Unit 1’s entering commercial operation.

NorthStar Medical Technologies of Beloit, Wis., will receive $37 million under two cooperative agreements with the National Nuclear Security Administration for the production of molybdenum-99 without the use of high-enriched uranium. Considered a critical medical radioisotope, Mo-99 is used in more than 40,000 medical procedures in the United States each day, including the diagnosis of heart disease and cancer.

The Transformational Challenge Reactor (TCR) program was launched in 2019 to demonstrate that highly improved, efficient systems can be created rapidly by harnessing the major advances in manufacturing, materials, and computational sciences that have emerged since the end of the first nuclear era. The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory leads the TCR program, which includes contributing partners from other DOE national laboratories and the U.S. nuclear industry. The program leverages some of the nation’s leading scientists and engineers and draws from ORNL’s lengthy history, institutional knowledge, and capabilities in high--performance computing, materials science development, advanced manufacturing techniques, and nuclear science and engineering.

Teachers and parents around the nation are learning about Navigating Nuclear: Energizing Our World—a K-12 nuclear science curriculum that now features content for all grade levels and can be accessed at ans.org/navigatingnuclear. The free online materials are classroom-ready, and include virtual field trips, project starters, and lessons available to every teacher and parent.

Crews are in the homestretch of completing demolition of Department of Energy–owned buildings at the former Energy Technology Engineering Center (ETEC) site in Ventura County, California, the agency reported on August 24.