September 12, 2024, 12:00PMNuclear NewsErhard W. Koehler and Anne Jennings N.S. Savannah docked in Baltimore in May 2024. (Photo: MARAD)
The American Nuclear Society was formed in 1954 in the wake of President Eisenhower’s seminal Atoms for Peace speech. Around the same time that Congress was debating the Atomic Energy Act and John Landis was helping establish ANS, the National Security Council began deliberating about adding a nuclear-powered merchant ship to the nascent Atoms for Peace program. We like to imagine that the idea germinated after Mamie Eisenhower christened the U.S.S. Nautilus, but the truth seems much drier. Regardless, Ike championed the project and announced it to a surprised crowd in an April 1955 speech in New York City at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Landis would become the principal architect of the ship’s nuclear power plant. Although Savannah’s reactor now rests in the low-level radwaste repository in Clive, Utah, the ship’s prospects are as bright as the future of ANS itself.
Hanford workers recently transferred three containers of nonradioactive test glass from the site’s WTP to the nearby Integrated Disposal Facility. (Photos: DOE)
According to the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, two contractors at its Hanford Site in Washington state have finished a first-time relay of test glass as the site prepares to vitrify—or immobilize in glass—millions of gallons of radioactive and chemical waste from its large underground tanks.
Video: Watch an “instant replay” of the test glass relay here.
ANS’s Craig Piercy and NEI’s Maria Korsnick announced their organizations’ collaboration at NEA 2024. (Photo: Dot Schneider/ANS)
The American Nuclear Society and the Nuclear Energy Institute have announced a new partnership regarding two of their flagship industry conferences.
ANS’s annual Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo and NEI’s Nuclear Energy Assembly will merge during the week of September 8, 2025, in Atlanta, Ga. The news was shared during the kickoff of the 2024 NEA meeting, happening this week in Philadelphia, Pa.
Radioactive decontamination waste is held in temporary storage in Iitate Village, Fukushima Prefecture, in 2019. (Photo: O. Evrard, J. P. Laceby, A. Nakao/Wikimedia Commons)
The International Atomic Energy Agency has found that Japan’s planned approach for recycling and disposing of soil and radioactive waste from decontamination activities after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident is consistent with the agency’s safety standards.
Work begins on the TBI demonstration at the Hanford Site, during which 2,000 gallons of low-activity waste will be treated and shipped off-site for disposal. (Photo: DOE)
The Energy Communities Alliance (ECA), which advocates for communities adjacent to or impacted by Department of Energy sites, is asking the department to conduct an independent analysis evaluating the impacts of delaying the implementation of its statutory interpretation of high-level radioactive waste, which holds that some waste from the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel may be classified as non-HLW.
DTC Operator Apprentice graduates include David Tolias, Scottie Tarver, Brandon Watkins, Johnaisha Patterson, Dustin Bates, Kyler McKie, Hudson Huckabee, Laura Burgess, Larry Tyler, Kevin Dickson, Matthew Darnall, John Bolin, Austin Harper, Jordan Floyd, and Mina Strickland. (Photo: DOE)
The Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina recently began onboarding 24 graduates from Denmark Technical College in Denmark, S.C., as part of SRS’s Production Operator Apprentice School.
Uranium prices since January 1, 2024. (Data source: TradingEconomics.com)
Uranium prices were about $79.60 per pound as of the close of business on September 3, which put prices near their lowest level since November 2023, according to the website Trading Economics. Since the beginning of 2024, uranium prices have decreased $11.40/lb, or 12.53 percent, based on trading on a contract for difference (CFD) that tracks the benchmark market.
A milestone for the largest decarbonization program in the Arab region
The Barakah nuclear power plant (Photo: Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation)
The Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation announced today a milestone for the United Arab Emirates with the fourth unit of the Barakah nuclear power plant entering commercial operation.