Lee

In his annual State of the State Address on January 31, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee offered more praise for nuclear energy, after lauding it earlier in the month during a tour of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar nuclear plant

“For decades, East Tennessee has been home to some of the best-kept secrets in nuclear energy and American innovation,” Lee told the state’s General Assembly. “Today, many may not realize that Tennessee derives more power from nuclear energy than from any other source. Recently, I visited the TVA’s Watts Bar nuclear facility, the last nuclear facility to be built in America, to see firsthand how nuclear power keeps our grid dependable even when the weather is not. Nuclear power is clean energy that actually works for the private sector.”

Constellation, formerly Exelon Generation, owner and operator of the nation’s largest nuclear reactor fleet, announced this morning the completion of its separation from Exelon Corporation and its launch as a stand-alone, publicly traded company. Headquartered in Baltimore, Md., the new company began trading today on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “CEG.”

Exelon announced last February that it had begun the effort to separate its utility businesses from its competitive power generation and customer-facing energy businesses.

Kite & Key Media, which produces short videos that provide context on an array of topical issues, has released an online video that sets the record straight on just what nuclear waste is and how its publicly perceived risks don’t match up with reality.

The government of Sweden announced on January 27 that it has issued a permit to the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB) to build a deep geological repository for spent nuclear fuel at Forsmark in the municipality of Östhammar. The government also issued a permit to construct a spent fuel encapsulation plant in Oskarshamn, where the country’s inventory of spent fuel is currently being stored.

Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R.) introduced “An act relating to microreactors” (SB 177) in the Alaska state legislature on February 1 that would modify existing state law on nuclear energy by specifying that microreactors are not subject to certain nuclear reactor siting and permitting regulations in Alaska. The bill defines a microreactor as an advanced nuclear fission reactor that would be capable of generating no more than 50 MWe.

Natrium, a 345-MWe sodium fast reactor with a molten salt energy storage system, was developed by TerraPower and GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy. TerraPower is planning to build the first Natrium demonstration reactor by 2028 with 50-50 cost-shared funding of about $2 billion from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. And for the requisite data and testing of reactor components to support that deployment, TerraPower is looking to Japan—a country with decades of experience developing sodium fast reactor designs and testing infrastructure.

Decades of fuel performance data coupled with advanced analytics and multi-processor computing have enabled the development of ‘novel’ modeling & simulation tools that allow nuclear fuel engineers to predict behavior across the entire fuel cycle. With this new capability nuclear fuel designers and fuel reload managers are better equipped to predict performance and reliability. These tools are fundamental to communicating highfidelity safety margin assessments with the regulator, and, when applied in the early stage of reactor design, can achieve optimum safety system functionality. At the apex of the fuel performance codes development pyramid sit a triad of codes: SI’s Pegasus, DOE’s Bison, and CEA’s Alcyone, which share the commonality of three-dimensional modeling and simulation of nuclear fuel performance. Unique among the capabilities represented by these codes is the ability to bridge the encoded-technology gap between the frontend and the backend of the fuel cycle to eliminate sources of uncertainties in spent fuel safety evaluations. This capability is a distinguishing feature of the Pegasus code.

In 2021, Entergy Nuclear provided dozens of grants, totaling $415,527, to nonprofit agencies in communities where Entergy’s nuclear plants operate, as well as its headquarters in Jackson, Miss. Overall, grants were awarded in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Michigan, the company announced on January 31.

The grant program administered through the nuclear plants focuses on funding education, literacy, healthy families, arts and culture, and other community improvement initiatives.

The government of the United Kingdom on January 31 announced the launch of Nuclear Waste Services. The new organization brings together site operator Low Level Waste Repository Limited, geological disposal facility developer Radioactive Waste Management Limited, and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s (NDA) Integrated Waste Management Program.

According to the U.K. government, Nuclear Waste Services will maintain current commitments to the Low-Level Waste Repository in West Cumbria, the geological disposal facility program, and the communities involved with both, while also creating a business with the capability to manage U.K. nuclear waste “safely and securely for generations to come.”

Los Angeles residents may see low-altitude aircraft near the sites of Super Bowl LVI activities on February 1 and 2. That’s when the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration will send a Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST) helicopter to measure expected background radiation as part of standard preparations to protect public health and safety for the National Football League’s biggest game.

More information and video footage of NEST’s work is available online.

A spokesperson for Georgia Power has confirmed that the projected in-service date for the new Vogtle-3 reactor remains the third quarter of 2022, according to an article published on January 27 on the Power magazine website. The in-service date for Vogtle-4 is targeted for the second quarter of 2023, the spokesperson said.

Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), the Department of Energy’s management and operating contractor for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, has reached an agreement with the state of South Carolina and federal environmental regulators on the final cleanup of a 25-mile-long stream corridor at the site that was radiologically contaminated as a result of operations during the Cold War.

The corridor consists of Par Pond, nine miles of canals adjacent to the pond, and a stream named Lower Three Runs. The stream begins near the center of the site, just above Par Pond, and winds its way southward across SRS.

Westinghouse Electric Company and Southern Nuclear have agreed to a plan to install four Westinghouse lead test assemblies in Vogtle-2, a 1,169-MWe pressurized water reactor located in Waynesboro, Ga. Four lead test assemblies containing uranium enriched up to 6 percent U-235 will be loaded in Vogtle-2 in 2023, marking the first time that fuel rods with uranium enriched above 5 percent U-235 are put in use in a U.S. commercial power reactor.

Designing a reactor is complicated but building one may be harder. Even companies that have had lots of practice haven’t always done it well. And all the power reactors in service today were built by companies that had years of experience in other kinds of big steam-electric power plants. In contrast, some of the creative new designs now moving toward commercialization come from start-ups that have never built anything at all. How should they prepare?

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued a confirmatory order to Holtec Decommissioning International (HDI) following an alternative dispute resolution mediation session regarding security-related violations at the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant in Lacey Township, N.J. A subsidiary of Holtec International, HDI is decommissioning Oyster Creek, which permanently ceased operations in 2018.

Due to the large amount of water used by nuclear power plants, measuring the water’s impact on the environment is a huge data processing task. It is impossible to manually measure millions of gallons, along with tracking wildlife and the weather. The data computation needed to understand environmental patterns takes massive amounts of storage and strong algorithms to uncover anomalies.

The Department of Energy announced yesterday that Secretary of Energy Achievement Awards were presented to a team of Savannah River Site employees for the completion of the multiyear Target Residue Material (TRM) campaign to support global nuclear security goals.

SRS is a 310-square-mile site located in South Carolina. It encompasses parts of Aiken, Barnwell, and Allendale counties and is bordered on the west by the Savannah River and the state of Georgia.

One of the last remaining milestones in fusion research before attaining ignition and self-sustaining energy production is creating a burning plasma, where the fusion reactions themselves are the primary source of heating in the plasma. A paper published in the journal Nature on January 26 describes recent experiments at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) that have achieved a burning plasma state.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) announced this week that preparations are well underway for the transfer of nearly 2,000 highly radioactive cesium and strontium capsules from the Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility (WESF) to interim dry storage at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash.

The ANS Fuel Cycle and Waste Management Division will present a webinar today at noon EST (the recording will be available via the webinar archive to all ANS members) featuring an international panel of experts on nuclear waste reprocessing. The panel will explore the idea of separating certain radionuclides from waste using recycling technology that enables pure materials to be used for other purposes.