The Department of Defense announced on September 13 that it has awarded a contract option to X-energy for the “enhanced engineering design” of a microreactor that could serve as the transportable power source envisioned by the Strategic Capabilities Office’s (SCO) Project Pele. The DOD expects the award for one year of work to “allow a thorough analysis of design options,” resulting in a preliminary engineering design and “initiation of a regulatory preapplication process.”

Workers at the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, also known as the Vit Plant, have begun removing the first three of 18 temporary startup heaters, the Department of Energy announced on September 12. The startup heaters were used to raise the first of two 300-ton glass melters in the plant’s Low-Activity Waste Facility to its operating temperature of 2,100°F.

Chubu Electric Power Company, owner and operator of the three-unit Hamaoka nuclear power plant in Japan’s Shizuoka Prefecture, has entered into an agreement to acquire issued shares in U.S. small modular reactor firm NuScale Power from Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), the utility announced on September 7. (JBIC bills itself as a government-owned, policy-based financial institution that prioritizes investment in businesses that will protect the global environment.)

The Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the University of Tennessee—Knoxville hosted a presentation titled “A Conversation of the Future of Nuclear Energy in the United States” on Tuesday, September 5. Panelists were ANS member Jamie Coble, associate professor of nuclear engineering at UTK and associate editor of the American Nuclear Society journal Nuclear Technology; ANS member Scott Hunnewell, vice president for new nuclear at the Tennessee Valley Authority; and ANS member Andrew Nelson, section head for nuclear fuel development at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The discussion was moderated by Charles Sims, director of the Center for Energy, Transportation, and Environmental Policy at the Baker School.

Spent Fuel Solutions, which advocates for a permanent disposal solution for the nation’s spent nuclear fuel, will be holding an informational webinar on Friday, September 15, from 11:00 a.m. to noon (PDT).

Having decided “to not associate to the Euratom Research and Training program (Euratom R&T) and, by extension, the Fusion for Energy Program,” the government of the United Kingdom announced plans on September 7 to support its homegrown UK Fusion Strategy by investing up to £650 million (about $811.8 million) through 2027 in a suite of research and development programs to support the country’s fusion sector and strengthen international collaboration. The funds are in addition to the £126 million (about $157.3 million) announced in November 2022 to support U.K. fusion R&D.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has released for public comment a draft site-specific environmental impact statement concerning subsequent license renewal for the two reactors at Florida’s Turkey Point power plant. The EIS’s preliminary conclusion is that any environmental impacts from the continued operation of the units for a period of 20 years beyond their current expiration dates “are not so great that preserving the option of SLR for energy-planning decision-makers would be unreasonable.”

The Environmental Protection Agency announced last week that it is adding Oklahoma’s Fansteel Metals/FMRI Superfund site to the National Priorities List. The list includes the nation’s most serious uncontrolled or abandoned releases of contamination and serves as the basis for prioritizing EPA Superfund cleanup funding and enforcement actions.

Holtec International’s ongoing effort to repower Michigan’s closed Palisades nuclear plant made progress this week with the signing of a power purchase agreement (PPA) between the firm’s Holtec Palisades Energy LLC subsidiary and Wolverine Power Cooperative, a not-for-profit energy provider to the rural communities across Michigan.

According to the World Nuclear Association’s newly released Nuclear Fuel Report: Global Scenarios for Demand and Supply Availability 2023–2040, there will be more of an increased demand than previously anticipated for nuclear fuel services and nuclear power capacity over the next several years. The report notes that the increased need for nuclear energy is associated with government efforts to decarbonize energy supplies and achieve energy security as well as growing interest in deploying new large nuclear reactors and small modular reactors (SMRs). The report is available to order now.

The Department of Energy announced $29 million in funding for seven team awards for research in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data resources for fusion energy sciences on August 31. In all, 19 institutions will build algorithms to address high-priority research opportunities in fusion and plasma sciences using interdisciplinary collaborations of fusion and plasma researchers teamed with data and computational scientists.

Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org

Hi friends, I hope you had a good summer. Like many of you, I took a break from my summer vacation to watch Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. I’m an unabashed Nolan fan—Inception and Interstellar rank among my top 10 favorite movies—but I’ll admit that Oppenheimer required more time for me to digest.

The film itself is first-rate: powered by a taut screenplay, its stripped-down elemental cinematography largely validates the director’s decision not to use any computer-generated imagery (although a couple of quick CGI scenes from the K-25 enrichment facility or the X-10 graphite reactor would have been really cool). The result is a historically faithful, largely accurate celebration of the brilliant minds that enabled one of the most daring engineering feats of all time.

The American Nuclear Society has added two new books to its publication catalog: Robert Busch’s Nuclear Criticality Safety: Evaluations, Calculations, and Experiences and Raymond J. Juzaitis’s Redemption of Prometheus: Creating a Sustainable Nuclear Enterprise for the 21st Century. The titles were released for purchase in late August and early September, respectively.

Kerry

During a side event held at last week’s Three Seas Initiative Summit in Bucharest, Romania, special presidential envoy for climate John Kerry announced U.S. actions to further the role of new nuclear technologies in accelerating the clean energy transition in Europe.

These actions, according to a September 7 media note from the U.S. State Department, expand on Romania’s leadership role in deploying the first small modular reactor in Europe and in converting a former Romanian coal plant to an SMR facility.

Building on his rollout of the Project Phoenix initiative at last year’s COP27 climate change conference in Egypt, Kerry said that proposals from the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia have been selected to participate in the project and will receive support for coal-to-SMR feasibility studies.

Abilene Christian University’s Gayle and Max Dillard Science and Engineering Research Center (SERC) has opened. SERC contains the Nuclear Energy eXperimental Testing Laboratory (NEXT Lab) and is the future home of one of the first advanced reactors in the United States. More than 300 people were on hand to celebrate the opening and tour the facility, including donors, government officials, and scientists from ACU and other research institutions.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has accepted for review CFPP LLC’s limited work authorization (LWA) application to permit certain early construction activities at the Carbon Free Power Project site in Idaho prior to the issuance of a combined license. (An LWA, according to 10 CFR 50.10, allows for “the driving of piles, subsurface preparation, placement of backfill, concrete, or permanent retaining walls within an excavation, installation of the foundation, including placement of concrete, any of which are for an SSC [safety-related structures, systems, or components] of the facility for which either a construction permit or combined license is otherwise required.”)

Wagner

Rufner

Advanced manufacturing is more than just additive manufacturing, as Jorgen Rufner and Adrian Wagner—both group leads at Idaho National Laboratory—would be quick to point out. Researchers at INL have been working with additive manufacturing (that’s 3D printing, colloquially) for decades. These days, INL boasts the largest industrial-scale electric field -assisted sintering (EFAS) machine of its kind and four other EFAS systems, including one coupled with a glove box for work with radioactive materials. That equipment and more can make samples, fuels, and components for both light water reactors and advanced reactors and for both publicly and privately funded programs.

BWX Technologies, Inc. has announced the details of a contract with the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration to process thousands of kilograms of government-owned scrap material containing enriched uranium and produce more than two metric tons of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) in an oxide form at an enrichment level of 19.75 percent U-235. That HALEU oxide could supply a fraction of the 22 metric tons the DOE has estimated will be needed by the mid-2020s to fuel advanced reactor demonstrations and meet existing commitments for research reactor fuel.

Harris

Abram

Cleo Abram and Johnny Harris are young, independent video journalists—and friends and colleagues—who have been posting educational and supportive videos about nuclear energy on YouTube.

Abram describes her work as “making optimistic tech explainers.” The name of her show is Huge If True, “an antidote to the doom and gloom, helping its audience decode the world around them and see positive futures they can help build.”

For the second consecutive year, the American Nuclear Society has selected two of its members to receive the Glenn T. Seaborg Congressional Science and Engineering Fellowship. The 2024 Congressional Fellows, Emily Caffrey and William Murray, will help the Society fulfill its strategic goal of enhancing nuclear policy by working in the halls of Congress, either in a congressional member’s personal office or with a committee, when their fellowship term begins in January.