Bradley Williams

The United States is already off to a good start with respect to new nuclear deployment. The completion of Vogtle Units 3 and 4, the Natrium groundbreaking, and X-energy’s partnership with Dow Chemical to deploy an advanced reactor for industrial applications are all important first steps. These efforts are being complemented by the flurry of licensing activity with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and overwhelming support in Congress and the White House. But to achieve the current administration’s goal of tripling nuclear capacity by 2050, more needs to be done.

Thick, black smoke pouring from one of the cooling towers at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant over the weekend raised alarm about safety at the facility as the military conflict with Russia continues.

On-site staff from the International Atomic Energy Agency witnessed the smoke and reported hearing multiple explosions at Zaporizhzhia, which is the largest nuclear plant in Europe and one of the largest worldwide.

The International Atomic Energy Agency announced on Aug. 7 that its experts have confirmed that the tritium concentration in the latest batch of water to be released from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is far below Japan’s operational limit. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) began discharging the treated and diluted water that day.

Engineering company Rolls-Royce is considering the sale of its small modular reactor subsidiary to inject new funding into the company’s overall business plans, the Sunday Telegraph first reported Aug. 3.

The company is looking to raise hundreds of millions, with a current valuation of £1.6 billion ($2 billion), as it sets its sights on being the first to deploy SMRs in the United Kingdom. Rolls-Royce recently cleared step two of the U.K.’s generic design assessment (GDA)—a competition launched in 2023 to bring SMRs on line in the 2030s.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is providing guidance to nuclear power plant licensees looking to use decommissioning trust fund (DTF) money to dispose of major reactor components like steam generators and reactor vessel heads while the plant is still operational.

On August 5, the NRC issued the interim staff guidance Use of the Decommissioning Trust Fund During Operations for Major Radioactive Component Disposal (REFS-ISG-2024-01), which provides the NRC staff’s regulatory position regarding the use a reactor’s DTF for the disposal of major radioactive components while the plant is still operational. Under NRC regulations, the DTF may be accessed solely for decommissioning expenses as defined in 10 CFR 50.2, unless an exemption is granted by the NRC.

The next nuclear renaissance may be upon us, but with it comes a perfect storm. The industry is unprepared for a surge in demand for goods and services from both the existing light water fleet and the next generation of reactors. We are currently teetering on the edge of severe supply chain issues, but if the nuclear industry can understand the sources of our challenges, we can mitigate them.

Westinghouse Electric Company announced Aug. 8 that it has completed the first pressing of ADOPT nuclear fuel pellets at the company’s Springfields Fuel Manufacturing Facility in the United Kingdom. The pellets, which can contain up to 8 percent uranium-235 by weight, are destined for irradiation testing in Southern Nuclear’s Vogtle-2 pressurized water reactor.

The Department of Energy yesterday announced 17 awards totaling $4.6 million for projects at private fusion companies in cooperation with U.S. national laboratories and universities through the Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE) program. Each one- to two-year award ranges from $100,000 to $500,000.

Energy Fuels has paused transport of uranium ore from its mine south of the Grand Canyon in Arizona to a processing facility in Utah—a path that crosses Navajo Nation land.

Lisa Marshall
president@ans.org

Energy is the foundation of modern society. It enhances quality of life and drives industrialization. As we work toward fuller energy transition, policies are essential to organizing our march forward. Bipartisan legislation is doing just that, propelling our current and future actions.

The Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act will help propel the work of industry, academia, and several branches of government in exciting—and necessary—directions.

The Senate introduced the act in March 2023, and the House of Representatives passed the Fire Grants and Safety Act, which incorporated the ADVANCE Act, on May 9, 2024 (393–13). Then on June 18, the Senate passed the ADVANCE Act (88–2), and on July 9, President Biden signed the bill into law. New and revised approaches to process and deployment of nuclear energy capacity is well on its way. Below, I have highlighted a few title sections to show scope and significance.

Bruce Power has announced the completion of its Unit 3 reactor removal—a milestone on its Major Component Replacement (MCR) project aimed at extending the Bruce plant’s operational life through 2064.

Transparency is one advantage of certain molten salts that could serve as both a coolant and fuel carrier in an advanced reactor. For scientists studying molten salt chemistry and behavior at the laboratory scale, it helps if the test vessel is transparent too. Now, Oak Ridge National Laboratory has created a custom glass test cell with a 1-liter capacity to observe how gases move within a column of molten salt, the Department of Energy announced August 5.

The Department of Energy has signed off on a $1.5 billion loan guarantee to Holtec Palisades LLC to support initial work needed to restart the Michigan nuclear plant.

Actor and politician Arnold Schwarzenegger recently criticized Germany for shutting down its remaining nuclear power plants last year. Speaking in June in his native Austria at the 2024 Austrian World Summit, a climate conference held in Vienna, Schwarzenegger noted the contradiction of the German government’s stated goal of cutting carbon emissions while simultaneously eliminating the clean-energy source of nuclear power.

Nuclear power already has an energy density advantage over other sources of thermal electricity generation. But what if nuclear generation didn’t require a steam turbine? What if the radiation from a reactor was less a problem to be managed and more a source of energy? And what if an energy conversion technology could scale to fit nuclear power systems ranging from miniature batteries to the grid? The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is asking these types of questions in a request for information on High Power Direct Energy Conversion from Nuclear Power Systems, released August 1.

A number of surveys and polls, such as Bisconti Research and University of Michigan surveys, have found steady or growing support for nuclear energy among Americans during the past several years. The Pew Research Center on Aug. 5 reported its nuclear-related findings from its survey conducted in May with a representative sample of U.S. adults. The results show 56 percent of respondents favor the construction of additional nuclear power plants in the United States.

That level of support is similar to last year’s findings (57 percent support) and is up substantially from the 43 percent, 50 percent, and 54 percent that Pew Research reported in 2020, 2021, and 2022, respectively.

The United States and Singapore have signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement, commonly known as a 123 Agreement.

U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken and Singapore’s minister of foreign affairs Vivian Balakrishan met on July 31 to formalize the agreement, which outlines a comprehensive framework for peaceful nuclear collaboration between the two nations based on a mutual commitment to nuclear nonproliferation.

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, which provides safety oversight of Department of Energy sites, is holding a public hearing on August 14 on benchmarking of best practices in the management of aging infrastructure.

According to the DNFSB, the goal of the hearing is to gather information from relevant organizations on best practices in infrastructure aging management to inform the development of potential safety improvements to DOE programs.

Vice Admiral Eugene P. “Dennis” Wilkinson (Photo: U.S. Navy)

August 10, 2024, marks the 106th birthday of Vice Admiral Eugene P. “Dennis” Wilkinson of the U.S. Navy (who died in his 95th year in July 2013). It is a fitting time to reflect on and honor the man who contributed so much to the navy and the worldwide nuclear power industry.

This video about the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944—the largest naval battle of World War II and a major contributing factor to the end of Japanese involvement—provides an exciting recount of the heroic U.S. submarines USS Darter (SS-227) and USS Dace (SS-247). A young Dennis Wilkinson was the torpedo data computer operator on the Darter, for which he was awarded the Silver Star. Wilkinson’s first-person recollections of this pivotal moment in U.S. naval history have been collected in Underway on Nuclear Power: The Man Behind the Words (2016, ANS).

The United States and Japan began rebuilding relations after the war. In 1966, Wilkinson, by then an admiral, was assigned chief of staff, U.S. Forces Japan, to continue those efforts.

Wald

“We’re going to have to do things differently if we hope to trim the output of climate-changing emissions,” writes Matthew L. Wald in an essay recently published by the Breakthrough Institute. Wald is an independent energy analyst, writer, and Nuclear News contributor who formerly worked for the Nuclear Energy Institute and the New York Times. In the essay, he says that despite optimism surrounding progress in clean energy, consumption of fossil fuels is growing, and greenhouse gas emissions are increasing.

Wald suggests that this situation is unlikely to turn around until small modular reactors and other advanced nuclear technologies are demonstrated to be commercially viable.

Race to zero emissions? Wald notes that “global consumption of fossil fuels grew 1.5 percent last year.” Furthermore, “the fossil mix is getting worse; oil was up even faster than total fossil consumption, and demand passed 100 million barrels a day for the first time.