As a spacecraft on a research mission hurtles at up to 100,000 miles per hour toward the surface of a gas giant like Jupiter, the atmospheric gases surrounding the spacecraft turn to plasma, and spacecraft temperatures increase to more than 10,000 °F.

Surrounded by members of his cabinet, congressional leaders, and others, President Biden yesterday afternoon signed into law the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act—representing a much-needed victory for the president, whose approval rating, according to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, sits at 41 percent.

A rendition of the HTR-PM. [CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE]

The second of the twin reactors making up the Shidaowan nuclear power plant’s high-temperature gas-cooled reactor pebble-bed module (HTR-PM) demonstration project reached initial criticality on November 11, China Huaneng Group has announced.

The milestone was achieved two months after the HTR-PM’s first unit had reached initial criticality. The two 200-MWe reactors are connected to a single steam turbine.

China Huaneng holds a 47.5 percent stake in the HTR-PM, with the remaining shares distributed between China Nuclear Engineering Corporation (32.5 percent) and Tsinghua University (20 percent). Construction of the facility, located in northeast China’s Shandong Province, began in 2012, led by Chinergy, a joint venture between CNEC and Tsinghua.

In April, President Biden announced a new U.S. climate target: a 50–52 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 2005 levels by 2030. It’s an ambitious goal, and one that’s right up there with recent climate declarations from Canada, the European Union, and the United Kingdom. It’s also one that, according to a new analysis from the Electric Power Research Institute, will require immediate action across all sectors of the economy.

Key findings of the EPRI report Strategies and Actions for Achieving a 50% Reduction in U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 2030 include the following:

• Halving GHG emissions by 2030 will involve significant efforts beyond business-as-usual trends.
• Reaching implied decarbonization targets for the power sector involves accelerated and sustained change.
• Electrification and efficiency gains drive GHG reductions in transport, industry, and buildings.
• Consistent emission-reduction strategies for achieving the “50 by 30” goal are emerging, but fundamental questions remain about how to support immediate action while building systems for planning and investment that are adaptive to new information.

Price

Devon Price, Entergy Corporation’s nuclear fleet outage services director, works out of the company’s headquarters in Jackson, Miss. He and his family own property in Elkton, Md., which was where a stranger knocked on his front door. “He said he was an arborist and has a keen eye for gorgeous trees, and he asked if he could take a look at the Norway spruce behind the house,” Price recalled.

The request: No problem, Price said, and they went into the backyard to view the 79-foot tree with branches that spread to a 46-foot diameter at the base. Gradually, the man revealed who he was: Erik Pauzé, head gardener at Rockefeller Center in New York City.

“He said, ‘Ever hear of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree? What would you think of letting this one go?’” Price recalled. Pauzé explained that it would be a donation and “would be a pretty big deal,” Price said.

Hot functional testing at Unit 3 of Pakistan’s Karachi nuclear power plant has been completed ahead of schedule, and the reactor has entered the fuel loading stage, China National Nuclear Corporation announced on November 11.

Swapping conventional electromagnetic radiation for fast neutrons, a team of research engineers at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, working with the Jozef Stefan Institute of Slovenia, report that they have successfully transmitted digital information wirelessly using nuclear radiation. The researchers’ attempts to transmit words and numbers using standard ASCII code “were 100 percent successful,” according to a November 10 press release from Lancaster University. Their research will be published in an upcoming issue of Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research and is now available online.

The Cintichem radioisotope production facility was located in Tuxedo, N.Y., 60 miles northwest of New York City, on a 100-acre site in the Sterling Forest Industrial Park. The facility was owned and operated by Union Carbide Corporation until 1984, when it was sold to Hoffman-LaRoche, a large pharmaceutical company.

The facility consisted of a 5-MWt, pool-type research reactor and production facility, connected via a 12-foot-deep, water-filled transfer canal to a bank of five adjacent hot cells. The facility began operation in the early 1960s, producing neutron-irradiated, enriched uranium target capsules. The fuel was 93 percent high-enriched uranium.

President Biden is expected to sign the recently passed $1.2 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill, which provides support for both existing and advanced nuclear, on Monday. However, the fate of its legislative companion, the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better Act—the other major component in the president’s ambitious domestic agenda—is far from certain.

The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) has amended Ontario Power Generation’s (OPG) operating license for its Darlington nuclear power station near Clarington, Ontario, allowing the company to produce the medical radioisotope molybdenum-99 using Darlington’s Unit 2 CANDU reactor. OPG subsidiary Laurentis Energy Partners, in conjunction with BWXT Medical, is leading the program to produce Mo-99 at Darlington.

The ANS Virtual Young Professionals Congress 2021 starts today! You won’t want to miss this gathering of the next generation of nuclear leaders as they host some of the biggest names in nuclear for an immersive personal and professional development experience.

The cost of attending YPC21 is $30 for students and $50 for professionals. Register now.

Wright

In a prerecorded video speech to last week’s Decommissioning Strategy Forum in Summerlin, Nev., Nuclear Regulatory Commission commissioner David Wright addressed public concerns about the growing number of utilities transferring their nuclear power reactor licenses to outside companies for accelerated decontamination and decommissioning after plant closure.

“While the NRC’s reactor decommissioning financial assurance program considers the potential for non-utility companies to conduct decommissioning, we have heard concerns about the use of these new license transfer models, given the significant acceleration of decommissioning schedules and withdrawals from decommissioning trust funds,” Wright said in his November 1 speech.

ANS is hosting a virtual Graduate School Fair on Friday, November 19, from 3:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. (EST). The goal of the event is to help prepare the next generation of nuclear professionals and to keep early career and seasoned experts at the top of their game. The event will be the second of its kind held by ANS.

Register now to participate in this event, which is free for ANS members.

The Interior Department’s U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) this week revealed its draft revised list of critical minerals—those deemed essential to economic and national security—and uranium is not on it.

The list was initially developed in 2018 in response to a December 2017 Trump administration executive order. Uranium was included as one of 35 minerals on that list.

X-energy and Centrus Energy announced last week that they have completed the preliminary design of the TRISO-X fuel fabrication facility and have signed a contract for the next phase of work. The planned facility would produce TRISO fuel particles and pack those particles into fuel forms, including the spherical graphite “pebbles” needed to fuel X-energy’s Xe-100 high-temperature gas reactor.

A new study by researchers from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—An Assessment of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant for Zero-Carbon Electricity, Desalination, and Hydrogen Production—makes a compelling case that the 2018 decision to shut down California’s only operating nuclear power plants needs another look—and that revenue options could make reversing the decision not just feasible but economically attractive.

“Fast-forward three years and things have changed,” said Jacopo Buongiorno, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT and one of the authors of the report, during a November 8 webinar. Since the decision was made to shut down Diablo Canyon’s twin pressurized water reactors in 2024 and 2025 when their current licenses expire, the state has passed bills calling for net zero carbon emissions by 2045 and for restrictions on land use that could effectively limit solar installation sprawl. Californian’s have also experienced repeated grid reliability issues and prolonged drought conditions.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued for public comment a draft environmental impact statement on NextEra Energy’s application for the subsequent license renewal of its Point Beach reactors, located in Two Rivers, Wis. Subsequent license renewal allows a reactor to operate for 20 years beyond the expiration of its original license renewal.

The Department of Energy has indefinitely delayed its final request for proposal (RFP) for the management and operations contract for the department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The contract’s postponement was announced in a brief notice posted to the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center website on November 9.