In January 2003—early in the “nuclear renaissance” of the 2000s—around 70 nuclear utility executives attended an ANS Utility Executive Conference, which was organized around the theme “Future Vision.” They traveled to Scottsdale, Ariz., to discuss how the nuclear community could achieve the bright future they envisioned just ahead—does that sound familiar?

Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org

Wow, that was a banger! The 2023 Annual Meeting had the energy level of an ANS Student Conference. That’s no easy feat. I’ve had several requests for my opening plenary remarks. Here is a shortened version, edited for reading:

So, “Failure Is Not an Option.” I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure about it in the beginning. It’s not anodyne like “Powering Our Future!” or some punny Indy reference like “Racing to the Finish.” It didn’t seem to fit our situation.

That phrase, popularized by the movie Apollo 13, has its origins in a time of crisis: three men trying to “eyeball” a free return trajectory to Earth while a team of NASA engineers figures out how to literally put a square peg into a round hole to save the astronauts’ lives.

Consulting company TVO Nuclear Services (TVONS), a subsidiary of Teollisuuden Voima Oyj, owner and operator of Finland’s three-unit Olkiluoto nuclear plant, has signed a memorandum of understanding with Norsk Kjernekraft, aka Norwegian Nuclear, a firm established last July with the goal of bringing small modular reactors to power reactor–deprived Norway.

A June 27 announcement from TVO said the new MOU provides the Norwegian firm with “access to the know-how and experience of one of the world’s best-known nuclear power companies” and stressed TVO’s 60 percent ownership of Posiva, the company responsible for the disposal of Finland’s spent nuclear fuel. “Posiva has successfully built the world’s first final disposal facility for high-level nuclear waste,” TVO stated. “This is decisively important for Norwegian Nuclear’s plans for the management of the entire life cycle of nuclear power.”

We’ve all seen the headlines such as “Should Japan Dump Fukushima's Radioactive Water into the Ocean?” along with “Japan Set to Pour Fukushima Waste into Pacific, Irking China” and “Japan Is Slowly but Surely Releasing Wastewater from the Fukushima Nuclear Plant into the Pacific Ocean.” The most recent spate of fearmongering was triggered by the IAEA’s July 4 announcement that the agency had finished its independent assessment of Japan’s plans to release the treated wastewater stored at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station and found the plan “consistent with IAEA Safety Standards.”

Sweden’s parliament, the Riksdag, recently endorsed a proposal in the government’s spring amending budget to change the country’s 2040 climate goal of 100 percent renewable electricity production to 100 percent fossil fuel–free electricity production.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management recently shipped for off-site disposal 14 sodium fluoride traps, or exchange vessels, from the C-310 Product Withdrawal facility at the DOE’s Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant site in Kentucky. DOE-EM said it has also eliminated the site’s entire inventory of chlorine gas cylinders.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently revised its regulations for the licensing, inspection, special projects, and annual fees it will charge its applicants and licensees for fiscal year 2023.

Princeton Stellarators Inc. (PSI) and Type One Energy Group are two of the eight fusion developers selected by the Department of Energy in late May to receive a total of $46 million in funding to kick off a public-private Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program aimed at developing fusion pilot plant designs and resolving related scientific and technological challenges within five to 10 years. The DOE’s selections cover an array of plasma confinement concepts, including the magnetic confinement stellarators being developed by PSI and Type One more than 70 years after the stellarator was first envisioned.

Nuclear Newswire previously took a close look at two of the DOE’s picks: Realta Fusion and Zap Energy (“innovative concept”) and Focused Energy and Xcimer Energy (inertial fusion). Here, we’ll examine how PSI and Type One are engineering solutions to the fusion plasma confinement challenge. Both companies are benefiting from recent advances in computing power and high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets. It’s in plans for design, manufacturing, assembly, and control of their stellarators that they differ.

When Ken Petersen is asked what he sees as the biggest challenges facing nuclear today and in the future, he immediately turns the question around. The 69th president of the American Nuclear Society prefers to focus on the positives of nuclear power instead of dwelling on the biggest challenges facing nuclear’s future prospects. That’s because there’s a lot to celebrate within the nuclear community—especially recently.

Most everything is trending up—from advanced technologies such as SMRs and microreactors to the promise of fusion energy to new ways of creating medical isotopes to progress in space exploration. “There’s huge momentum for nuclear right now,” Petersen said. “We're getting support from the environmentalist community and from legislation. I see it as a huge opportunity for us to continue to grow. It’s an exciting time. And it’s not just the U.S. It’s worldwide, too.”

Jeff Baran, who has been renominated for another five-year term on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has received a vote of confidence from a progressive policy research organization. On June 14, the same day his renomination was reported favorably out of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in a 10–9 vote, the organization—Good Energy Collective—released a statement from its deputy director, Jackie Toth, in praise of the commissioner.

Westinghouse Electric Company has signed a contract extension with EDF Energy to supply fuel for the United Kingdom’s advanced gas-cooled reactor (AGR) fleet, the American firm announced yesterday.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management and the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) have negotiated a settlement on terms to renew the 10-year operating permit for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. The DOE, along with WIPP’s operating contractor, Salado Isolation Mining Contractors, and the NMED negotiated the settlement with New Mexico stakeholders.

Advanced reactors may be key to a clean energy future, but to prove it they’re going to need fuel—and that fuel will be derived from limited uranium resources and managed throughout the nuclear fuel cycle, whether that cycle is open (like the current fuel cycle) or closed (with reprocessing). Six panelists convened on June 12 during the Annual Meeting of the American Nuclear Society for the executive session “Merits and Viability of Advanced Nuclear Fuel Cycles: A Discussion with the National Academies.” They discussed those fuel cycles and the findings of a National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) consensus committee released as a draft report in November 2022 and published earlier this year.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Poland’s National Atomic Energy Agency (PAA) have renewed their cooperation agreement for the next five years.

Westinghouse and TerraPower, in conjunction with Belgium’s Pan Tera, have announced plans to produce large quantities of actinium-225, a radioisotope used for targeted alpha radiation therapy for certain types of cancer.

Nuclear Waste Services, the United Kingdom’s radioactive waste management organization, launched in January 2022, has begun a wide range of studies to evaluate sites that could be suitable to host a geological disposal facility (GDF).

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff has completed its final safety evaluation for Kairos Power’s application to build its Hermes advanced test reactor at a site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., the agency announced recently. The evaluation found no safety aspects precluding issuance of a construction permit for the proposed reactor.

The American Nuclear Society is collaborating with the Kenan Fellows Program for Teacher Leadership (KFP) at North Carolina State University to introduce a nuclear science curriculum to Kenan Fellows and the K-12 students they teach.

The Finnish company Steady Energy, a spinout entity from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, announced on June 27 that it has raised €2 million in seed funding led by VTT, Yes VC, and Lifeline Ventures. Steady Energy aims to build what it said would be the world’s first reactor-based heating plant by 2030. The company will use the funding to work on research and development to demonstrate the functionality of its LDR-50 plant by building a 1:1 scale mock-up powered by electric heat.