More than 700 registered attendees descended on Florida’s Marco Island for the ANS Utility Working Conference this week, with many traveling through a wave of severe storms to get there—a fitting start to a meeting themed “Building Resiliency in a Rapidly Changing World.”

Three days of panels and educational sessions formally opened on Monday, August 7, with a plenary on “The Nuclear Industry’s State of Resiliency” featuring three invited speakers: Annie Caputo, NRC commissioner; Bob Willard, president and chief executive officer of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations; and Jeff Lyash, president and CEO of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Matthew Rasmussen, general chair of the UWC and senior vice president for engineering and operations support at TVA, introduced the speakers following opening remarks from ANS President Kenneth Petersen and ANS Executive Director/CEO Craig Piercy. Together, the plenary speakers pointed to challenges ahead in ensuring effective leadership, nuclear plant resilience, and energy security—and found cause for celebration in the recent and long-awaited announcement of commercial operation at Vogtle-3.

The Department of Energy’s Hanford Site has introduced its newest team members, Dee and Freda, two highly skilled explosive-detecting K-9 officers. The police dogs will work with Richland Operations Office contractor Hanford Mission Integration Solutions to help ensure the safety and security of the legacy nuclear reservation near Richland, Wash.

The Swedish Radiation Safety Authority (SSM) has issued a final report to the Swedish government regarding its investigation into how the regulatory framework for the country’s nuclear power might be improved.

Immediate past president Steven Arndt announced at the ANS Annual Meeting that Yassin Hassan, Distinguished Professor, Regents Professor, and the L. F. Peterson ’36 Chair II in Engineering at Texas A&M University, will be the next technical editor of ANS’s Nuclear Technology journal.

Following the 2022 Annual Meeting, ANS past president Andrew Klein (2016–2017), professor emeritus of nuclear science and engineering at Oregon State University and the current editor of NT, announced that he would retire at the end of his term in June 2023. That started the clock for ANS’s Technical Journals Committee to begin the search for a new technical editor. After numerous virtual meetings and interviews, the committee, chaired by ANS members Robert Little and Elia Merzari, recommended Hassan to Arndt per the ANS bylaws.

To expand interim storage of vitrified high-level radioactive waste at the Savannah River Site, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management and its liquid waste contractor Savannah River Mission Completion (SRMC) have double stacked 2,000 canisters in one of the site's two glass waste storage buildings (GWSB). GWSB 1 consists of a below-grade, seismically qualified concrete storage location containing support frames for the vertical storage of 2,262 10-foot-tall canisters.

Young members have always been an asset to the American Nuclear Society, attending the Annual and Winter Meetings; joining Society divisions, groups, and student sections; and leading their own events and webinars. ANS would like to highlight some of its young members for their contributions to bringing nuclear energy to the larger world beyond our industry.

Unit 6 at the Bruce nuclear power plant in Kincardine, Ontario, achieved a sustained fission chain reaction over the weekend—a key step in returning the 817-MWe CANDU reactor to commercial operation, Bruce Power announced yesterday.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced that the first batches of glass-forming beads, called frit, were poured last week into a melter at the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP), also known as the Vit Plant. The melter, which has been heated to 2,100ºF, will be used to immobilize Hanford’s radioactive and chemical tank waste, turning it into a stable glass form through vitrification.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued a new report, Metal Fuel Qualification--Fuel Assessment Using NRC NUREG-2246, “Fuel Qualification for Advanced Reactors,” which documents experience with the zirconium-clad ceramic fuel system in fast reactors and presents the fuel qualification case for a data-supported fuel design and set of operating conditions. The research includes identifying as-fabricated conditions (e.g., dimensions, chemistry) and in-pile conditions (e.g., linear heat generation rates, burnup, temperature) and anticipated operational occurrences.

Here is a recap of industry happenings over the past month:

ADVANCED REACTOR MARKETPLACE

International SMR collaboration launched

The nine member states of the International Nuclear Regulators’ Association (INRA)—Canada, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States—have agreed to collaborate on the generic design assessment and licensing of small modular reactor technologies. According to a statement released by the organization, the internationally standardized reactor designs would aid in the facilitation of efficient regulatory reviews, although local issues such as siting and environmental factors must be addressed by national regulatory agencies. The INRA members expressed their support for the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Nuclear Harmonisation and Standards Initiative, but they stressed that independent, national regulatory reviews should not be replaced by an international approach.

Łukasz Młynarkiewicz (left), acting president of PEJ, and Krzysztof Zaremba, rector of the Warsaw University of Technology, signed an agreement on August 7 regarding the training of personnel for Poland’s nuclear energy program. (Photo: Warsaw University of Technology)

Polskie Elektrownie Jądrowe (PEJ), the state-owned firm set up to lead Poland’s efforts to establish a civil nuclear power program, signed an agreement yesterday with the Warsaw University of Technology to cooperate on the training of personnel for the nuclear sector.

The agreement provides for “substantive and research cooperation” as well as “cooperation in the development and implementation of scholarship programs [and] co-organization of competitions for scientific works or design competitions,” PEJ said in a news release. PEJ and the university will also work together on a curriculum to enable graduates to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to find employment in the nuclear energy field, the company added.

According to Poland’s Ministry of Climate and Environment, there are already some 80 companies operating in the Central European nation that provide services to nuclear technology vendors worldwide, with another 300 ready to join the nuclear supply chain.

Technical specialist Peter King (left) and Sam Jay, UAV engineer and chief pilot, at Sellafield’s Engineering Centre of Excellence, with the Flyability Elios 3 drone. (Photo: Sellafield)

Sellafield Ltd., a subsidiary of the U.K. government’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, announced that drone pilots have successfully completed two firsts in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) at the Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria, England.

According to the company, the flights, which accessed a Sellafield building with limited space using a light detection and ranging (lidar) sensor and a radiation dosimeter, are helping improve the safety of employees during the decommissioning of the site’s legacy buildings.

Mapping flight: First, an Elios 3 drone equipped with a lidar sensor was able to successfully collect data from a site building. The data will be processed to produce a 3D model of the area, which will help inform engineering decisions. According to Sellafield, the mapping flight marks a major milestone for the site’s UAV team, enabling unparalleled efficiency in mapping and 3D modeling.

Five pronuclear organizations—the Breakthrough Institute, Clean Air Task Force, ClearPath, Nuclear Innovation Alliance, and Third Way—have together penned a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, calling on the agency to take action on its emergency preparedness for advanced reactors rule—which, despite the explosion of interest in these technologies over the past few years, has yet to be finalized.

Three college interns from the Savannah River Site were the keynote speakers at a recent Up & Atom Breakfast hosted by Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness (CNTA). The breakfast was held at Newberry Hall in Aiken, S.C.

More than 100 people from Savannah River National Laboratory and the Hanford Site participated recently in a workshop to share analytical knowledge focused on the cleanup of radioactive tank waste at Department of Energy sites.

The seven new members of the ANS Board of Directors began their terms at the end of the 2023 ANS Annual Meeting. The newest members include the vice president/president-elect, four U.S. members elected to three-year terms, one non-U.S. member of the Board, and a student member. Get to know a little about the new ANS leadership below.

In Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN), the deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion reaction ³H(d,n)⁴He, enhanced by the 3/2⁺ “Bretscher resonance,” is responsible for 99 percent of primordial helium-4. While this fact has been known for decades, it has not been widely appreciated. The importance of the resonant nature of the DT fusion reaction has been amplified by recent activities related to the production and use of terrestrial fusion, including the recent net-gain shot at the National Ignition Facility (NIF). Here, we aim to highlight the anthropic importance of the ⁴He-producing DT reaction that plays such a prominent role in models of nucleosynthetic processes occurring in the early universe. This primordial helium serves as a source for the subsequent creation of more than 25 percent of the carbon (¹²C) and other heavier elements that compose a substantial fraction of the human body. Further studies are required to determine a better characterization of the amount of ¹²C than this lower limit of 25 percent. Some scenarios of core stellar nucleosynthetic yield of ¹²C suggest that even higher percentages of carbon from primordial helium are possible.

The Department of Energy announced last week that Melter 1 at the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, also known as the Vit Plant, has hit its operational temperature of 2,100ºF. The DOE began heating Melter 1 in October 2022, but was soon forced to pause when abnormalities in the heaters’ power supply were encountered.

Canadian nuclear tech firm Terrestrial Energy has signed a manufacturing and supply contract with Springfields Fuels Limited—a Britain–based subsidiary of Westinghouse Electric Company—for the design and construction of an Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR) fuel pilot plant.

In an August 3 press release, Terrestrial said that Springfields’ reactor fuel manufacturing facility has extensive existing infrastructure available to support the fuel supply for IMSR development and is scalable to support a fleet of IMSR plants operating in the 2030s. Located near Preston, Lancashire in northwestern England, the Springfields facility is the only site in the United Kingdom for nuclear fuel manufacturing.

U.S. Congressman Chuck Fleischmann (R., Tenn.) speaks at the ETEC NOW Conference in Knoxville. (Photo: Type One Energy

Type One Energy Group, a Madison, Wis. –based stellarator fusion energy company, announced the opening of new offices in Oak Ridge, Tenn., during the East Tennessee Economic Council’s fifth annual NOW Conference, held August 1–2 in Knoxville.

Type One Energy’s expansion into Oak Ridge follows the company’s recent funding of an oversubscribed seed round of $29 million. The company is also one of eight fusion developers that was selected by the Department of Energy in late May to receive a total of $46 million in funding to kick off the public-private Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program, aimed at developing fusion pilot plant designs.