This past October, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) and its contractor Isotek successfully completed processing and disposing the low-dose inventory of uranium-233 stored at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), ending a two-year effort that has eliminated a portion of the site’s legacy nuclear material and provided rare nuclear isotopes for next-generation cancer treatment research.

Without a plan for addressing issues in completing construction projects at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, the Department of Energy cannot ensure that further cost increases and schedule delays will not continue, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office. In particular, the GAO said, the DOE has not developed a corrective action plan to address root causes identified for the rising cost and the delay in building a new ventilation system at the transuranic waste repository.

Nebraska Public Power District and Entergy have agreed to terminate their nearly 20-year-old support services agreement for the Cooper nuclear power plant.

NPPD said on Monday that it intends to continue operating the plant—Nebraska’s sole power-generating nuclear facility—and will use Entergy and other available industry resources, as appropriate.

The United States must ramp up the domestic production of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), the panelists agreed during a March 11 members-only webinar held amid heightened concerns about energy security following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the day after Congress approved $45 million for the HALEU Availability Program for fiscal year 2022.

John Starkey, ANS director of public policy, moderated the webinar, which featured panelists Scott Kopple, senior director of government relations at BWX Technologies; Everett Redmond, senior technical advisor at the Nuclear Energy Institute; Benjamin Reinke, senior director of corporate strategy and advisor to the CEO at X-energy; Patrick White, project manager at the Nuclear Innovation Alliance (NIA); and Brad Williams, a member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee staff.

A recording of the webinar is available to ANS members.

According to a report published by the World Economic Forum, the top two skills that will help humans thrive in the fourth industrial revolution (i.e., the age of machine learning and artificial intelligence) are critical thinking and complex problem-solving.

My journey of discovery spans nearly four decades and four careers: the U.S. Navy, commercial nuclear power, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and consulting for the federal government. Along this journey, I was fortunate to gain a vast amount of experience in solving complex problems through the teachings of W. Edwards Deming, Joseph M. Juran, and others.

An article posted on the Interesting Engineering website on March 10 highlights a recent YouTube video that provides an overview of the advantages, current status, future possibilities, and practical challenges of small modular reactors, along with a look at the even smaller microreactors. The video is available on the “Undecided with Matt Ferrell” channel. Ferrell describes himself as “a UI/UX [user interface/user experience] designer by trade” and “a lifelong tech enthusiast.”

The election last week of Yoon Suk Yeol as president of South Korea has provided a big boost for that nation’s nuclear energy-related stocks. Yoon, of the conservative People Power Party, defeated Lee Jae-myung, of the incumbent liberal Democratic Party, on a pro-nuclear platform. As reported by marketwatch.com, Yoon has promised to “reinvigorate the nuclear-energy industry by reactivating suspended atomic power plants and resuming building new ones.”

The ANS Education, Training and Workforce Development Division is hosting a webinar titled “Securing a Strong Workforce for the Next Generation of Reactors,” to be held on Wednesday, March 16, from 12:30 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. (EDT).

Register now. The webinar is complimentary and open to all.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission offered an overall reassuring message last week regarding the performance of the nation’s commercial reactors in 2021.

“The work of the nuclear power plant operators for almost every reactor fully meets our stringent safety and security performance objectives,” said Andrea Veil, director of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation. “Yet even those high-performing units will undergo thousands of inspection hours this year under our normal ‘baseline’ inspection program.”

Westinghouse Electric Company and nuclear waste management company Perma-Fix Environmental Services plan to jointly develop a state-of-the-art advanced materials treatment facility in the United Kingdom. During the 2022 Waste Management Symposia, held last week in Phoenix, Ariz., the two companies signed a nonbinding agreement to cooperate on a facility that will provide low-level radioactive waste treatment services to the European market.

David Edsey

This past October, the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis held a hearing titled “Good for Business: Private Sector Perspectives on Climate Action.” The hearing reviewed perspectives on the importance of the government’s investments in climate action and how these investments would contribute to job creation and economic growth. Those testifying included the founder of a solar energy company, the head of communications and policy for a popular outdoors clothing company, a former deputy energy secretary for the Department of Energy, and an executive from an insurance company.

While the solar company founder and the communications head spoke out against nuclear energy, the former deputy energy secretary, during testimony, was in favor of it. The insurance executive, David Edsey, also talked in support of nuclear during the committee’s Q&A session after testimony.

Europe’s first EPR, Unit 3 at Finland’s Olkiluoto nuclear power plant, was connected to the nation’s grid on March 12, Teollisuuden Voima Oyj (TVO), the facility’s owner and operator, has announced.

Olkiluoto-3 is also the first new Finnish reactor in four decades, and one of only three new reactors in Europe in the past 15 years. (Romania’s Cernavoda-2 began supplying electricity to the grid in August 2007, and Belarus’s Belarusian-1 in November 2020.)

The European Union could reduce imports of Russian natural gas by more than a third within a year through a combination of measures that would support energy security and affordability and would be consistent with the European Green Deal, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency.

“Nobody is under any illusions anymore,” said IEA executive director Fatih Birol on announcing the release of the report, A 10-Point Plan to Reduce the European Union’s Reliance on Russian Natural Gas. “Russia’s use of its natural gas resources as an economic and political weapon shows Europe needs to act quickly to be ready to face considerable uncertainty over Russian gas supplies next winter. . . . Europe needs to rapidly reduce the dominant role of Russia in its energy markets and ramp up the alternatives as quickly as possible.”

The Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) has awarded a total of $36 million for 11 projects to develop technologies that will limit the amount of waste produced from advanced reactors and will support sustainable domestic fuel stocks. The projects include research into the facilities and systems required to reprocess, recycle, and dispose of spent fuel generated through diverse advanced reactor fuel cycles.

Imagine life without refrigeration, television, clean cooking facilities, clean water, clothes washers, and electric lights. For the roughly 1 billion people around the world without access to electricity, energy poverty is a reality that drastically reduces their quality of life and economic opportunities.

At the same time, fossil fuels currently provide more than 60 percent of electricity and about 80 percent of energy worldwide, even as global carbon dioxide levels are higher than at any point in at least the past 800,000 years.

With three commercial teams under contract to produce reactor designs for nuclear thermal propulsion rockets that would use solid high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel to heat hydrogen propellant, NASA’s investment in nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) has increased in recent years. But just as there is more than one way to fuel a terrestrial reactor, other fuels are under consideration for future NTP rocket engines.

IAEA director general Rafael Mariano Grossi traveled to Antalya, Turkey, on March 10 to meet with Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to discuss the safety and security of Ukraine's nuclear facilities. After returning to Vienna, Grossi held a press conference at which he said that a “common denominator” had emerged from the discussions and that both sides agree that something needs to be done. “They are both ready to work and to engage with the IAEA,” he said. “So this is a very important building block.”

After offering a small shred of hope that it might be persuaded to keep its remaining power reactors in operation a bit longer to reduce its dependence on Russia for energy, Germany has opted to continue with its nuclear phaseout. The last three operating German reactors, Neckarwestheim-2, Isar-2, and Emsland, are slated for shutdown later this year.

After months of negotiations, the House passed a fiscal year 2022 omnibus spending package late Wednesday—the same day that congressional appropriators from both chambers unveiled the long-awaited measure.

Labeled H.R. 2471, the 2,741-page, $1.5 trillion package includes all 12 of the standard annual appropriations bills, providing $730 billion for nondefense programs, a $46 billion (6.7 percent) jump from FY 2021, and $782 billion for defense programs, a $42 billion (5.6 percent) boost. (The bill also includes $13.6 billion to address the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.)

The House also approved, by voice vote, a stopgap bill to extend government funding to March 15 to give the Senate time to review the omnibus bill and send it to the president’s desk for his signature. At this writing, funding for the federal government runs out tomorrow.

Today’s #ThrowbackThursday post looks back at some of Nuclear News’s reporting on the Fukushima Daiichi accident, which was initiated 11 years ago tomorrow. The news reporting includes the initial coverage of the event from the pages of Nuclear News in April 2011 and the in-depth coverage of the 2011 ANS Annual Meeting, where special sessions focused on the accident.