The Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. (Photo: Doc Searls)
The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted last Thursday to extend the life of Diablo Canyon an additional five years. The decision was the final step in the extension of the state's last remaining nuclear power plant, whose two reactors will now operate until at least 2029 and 2030, respectively, instead of closing in 2024 and 2025.
Africa is home to 1.5 billion people in 54 countries living on 12 million square miles. The economies of many of these countries are hobbled by a general dearth of energy that nuclear could solve without adding to the harm of global warming.
The World Nuclear Association and the African Commission on Nuclear Energy (AFCONE) last year signed a memorandum of understanding to encourage the use of nuclear energy in support of economic growth and sustainable energy development in Africa.
December 15, 2023, 4:56PMNuclear NewsDonna Kemp Spangler and Joel Hiller BWXT’s microreactor components would be designed to be transported directly from the factory to the deployment site. (Image: BWXT)
“The tools of the academic designer are a piece of paper and a pencil with an eraser. If a mistake is made, it can always be erased and changed. If the practical-reactor designer errs, he wears the mistake around his neck; it cannot be erased. Everyone sees it.”
Many in the nuclear community are familiar with this sentiment from Admiral Rickover. A generation of stagnation in the industry has underscored the truth of his words. But as economies around the world put a price on carbon emissions, there’s a renewed sense of urgency to deploy clean energy technologies. This shifts the global balance of economic competitiveness, and it’s clear that the best path forward for nuclear requires combining the agility of private innovators with the technology and capabilities of national laboratories.
UCOR’s Ken Rueter speaks to University of Tennessee students during an engineering colloquium series. (Photo: DOE)
A significant percentage of the workforce at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee is eligible to retire in the next decade, according to the agency. In an effort to address the potential for a staffing shortage, UCOR, the DOE’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management contractor for cleanup activities at the site, is building a consortium with colleges and universities in the region. The collaboration aims to guide more students toward nuclear-applicable careers to build the next generation of workers for Oak Ridge and the nuclear industry at large.
Attendees at the New Nuclear for Maritime summit in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Core Power)
Core Power, a private maritime technology company based in the United Kingdom, held the international summit New Nuclear for Maritime in Washington, D.C., that brought together leaders and experts to explore the latest opportunities in advanced nuclear applications for the maritime industry. Several American Nuclear Society members were featured on panel discussions, including Jess Gehin, Idaho National Laboratory’s associate lab director for nuclear science and technology.
Applause at the conclusion of COP28. (Photo: Kiara Worth/UN Climate Change)
The United Nations' Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP28) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, closed on December 13 after debate on a “global stocktake” pushed negotiations a full day past the scheduled end date. Though advocates hoping for a phaseout of fossil fuels were ultimately disappointed and must settle for “transitioning away,” another first—after 30 years of global climate conferences—is the inclusion of nuclear energy among the zero-emissions and low-emissions technologies that still could, if deployment is accelerated, support deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming to 1.5°C.
A view of two vessels that each contain approximately 30,000 pounds of granulated activated carbon, used to remove mercury from process off-gas during IWTU operations. (Photo: DOE)
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management said Idaho’s Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) is set to resume radioactive liquid waste treatment operations early next year after crews replaced carbon material from two plant vessels. The IWTU was shut down for an unplanned outage on September 6 to address elevated mercury concentrations in the plant’s granulated activated carbon (GAC) beds, according to Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) reports.
STARFIRE is the name of an inertial fusion energy hub led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—one of three hubs announced in early December. (Image: LLNL)
The Department of Energy recently announced that it was establishing three inertial fusion energy (IFE) hubs and funding them with a total of $42 million over four years. The leaders of the three hubs selected by competitive peer review—Colorado State University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the University of Rochester—all issued press releases touting the attributes and plans of their facilities and their research collaborators on the same day—December 7.
Concept art for a Hermes plant. (Image: Kairos Power)
Kairos Power has received the go-ahead from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build its Hermes demonstration reactor at the Heritage Industrial Park in Oak Ridge, Tenn., making it the first non–light water reactor approved for construction in the United States in more than 50 years.
Concept art of an ARC-100 plant. (Image: ARC)
Small modular reactor developer ARC Clean Technology, Canadian utility New Brunswick Power, and nuclear plant operator Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power have signed a memorandum of understanding to explore opportunities for commercializing ARC technology in Canada, South Korea, and the United States, as well as in other regions where KHNP has business operations.
The Palisades nuclear power plant. (Photo: Entergy)
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has granted Holtec Decommissioning International’s request to revise the emergency preparedness plan for the Palisades nuclear power plant in Covert, Mich., to reflect the plant’s decommissioning status.
Carson Noack poses alongside the NEXT Lab’s Molten Salt Test System drainage tank, for which he played a key role in designing and fabricating.
(Photo: Kamryn Kelly)
Carson Noack is a busy young man with a clear vision of the future of energy. The 23-year-old undergraduate is slated to receive his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Abilene Christian University (ACU) in 2024. He’s also a researcher in the university’s Nuclear Energy eXperimental Testing (NEXT) Laboratory, which has been making news with its plans to build the first new research reactor in the United States in more than 30 years—the Molten Salt Research Reactor (MSRR).