As COP29 kicked off November 11, industry advocates worldwide are hoping to draw attention and increase buy-in to the need for more nuclear capacity.

Constellation Energy has announced that it will seek to restart Unit 1 of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania as part of an agreement with Microsoft to power that company’s data centers. Given the growing interest by tech companies in using clean, reliable nuclear power to meet their growing energy demands, the September 20 announcement to reopen TMI-1, which was shut down and defueled in 2019, was not a huge surprise.

Seeking spacecraft that can “maneuver without regret,” the U.S. Space Force is investing $35 million in a national research team led by the University of Michigan to develop a spacecraft with an onboard microreactor to produce electricity, with some of that electricity used for propulsion. But this spacecraft would not be solely dependent on nuclear electric propulsion—it would also feature a conventional chemical rocket to increase thrust when needed.

Workers recently completed an 18-month project replacing 11 hot cell windows at the 222-S Laboratory at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state. Hanford contractor Navarro-ATL manages the lab.

The little-known Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST) was highlighted recently on the popular NPR show “All Things Considered” and was accompanied by an online feature.

FLiBe—a mixture of lithium fluoride and beryllium fluoride—is not an off-the-shelf commodity. The Department of Energy suspects that researchers and reactor developers may have a use for the 2,000 kilograms of fluoride-based salt that once ran through the secondary coolant loop of the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Federal and contractor officials, community leaders, and educators gathered in Knoxville, Tenn., on October 29 for a roundtable event focused on ensuring the Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) and its partners have the resources and infrastructure needed to support a robust, talented workforce in the years ahead.

As a primer to the American Nuclear Society Winter Conference and Expo, ANS Executive Director/Chief Executive Craig Piercy hosted a panel discussion titled “The State of Nuclear,” sponsored by the ANS Trustees of Nuclear. The October 29 discussion, the first in a two-part series, featured five thought leaders from the nuclear community as they reviewed the current state of nuclear power. The second panel will take place during the ANS Winter Conference in Orlando, Fla., on November 18.

The U.S. and South Korea have reached a provisional agreement and are working on a memorandum of understanding to advance the countries’ partnership on civil nuclear energy.

As the U.S. election season finally comes to an end, the annual American Nuclear Society election season is right around the corner. Seventeen candidates have been nominated for the positions of ANS vice president/president-elect, treasurer, and six positions on the board of directors (four U.S. directors, one non-U.S. director, and one student director). Ballots will be sent via email on Tuesday, March 4, 2025, and must be submitted by 1:00 p.m. (EDT) on Tuesday, April 15, 2025.

The discovery of a rare species of bee by environmental regulators has blocked the plans of tech conglomerate Meta to build an artificial intelligence data center powered by nuclear energy—at least temporarily. Numerous media outlets, including Popular Science, have reported that the unnamed species of bee was detected by regulators who were surveying the land designated for the new data center—land that is located next to an unnamed nuclear power plant from which Meta had planned to obtain electricity.

Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), the managing and operating contractor at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and the DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are partnering with multiple universities to develop next-generation technology and personnel pipelines to advance the DOE National Nuclear Security Administration’s two-site pit production mission.

Leadership of the United Kingdom’s STEP (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production) fusion program has transitioned to U.K. Industrial Fusion Solutions Ltd. (UKIFS), a wholly owned subsidiary of the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA). UKIFS was established in February 2023 to lead a public-private partnership that will design, build, and operate the STEP prototype fusion energy plant in Nottinghamshire in England’s East Midlands region.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is asking for public comment on its draft supplemental environmental impact statement for Diablo Canyon’s license renewal request.

A software algorithm developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has reduced the time needed to inspect 3D-printed parts for nuclear applications by 85 percent, the Department of Energy announced on November 1, and that algorithm is now being trained to analyze irradiated materials and nuclear fuel at Idaho National Laboratory.

Uranium prices have fallen to their lowest level in more than a month, to just under $79 per pound, on Friday, November 1, according to analyst website Trading Economics. The lower prices, according to the site, are related to recent evidence of increased supply. This contrasts with the longer-term expectations of bullish demand and higher prices.

American Nuclear Society member Jeff Terry hosted this year’s Nuclear Science Week meeting at the Illinois Institute of Technology (Illinois Tech) on October 26. In his opening remarks, Terry, a physics professor at Illinois Tech, described the institute’s 12-year history of Nuclear Science Week events, going back to the 2012 meeting that included the Nuclear Clean Energy Indy car on display.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has denied plans for Talen Energy to supply additional on-site power to an Amazon Web Services’ data center campus from the neighboring Susquehanna nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.

Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org

As you may have heard, the American Nuclear Society recently entered into a 50/50 joint venture with the Nuclear Energy Institute to host an annual industrywide meeting in late summer, which will replace ANS’s Utility Working Conference and NEI’s Nuclear Energy Assembly. Simply put, we are taking the best of both events to create the ultimate nuclear power meeting of the year. If you are a longtime UWC attendee, you will feel right at home in the aisles of the exhibit hall, or in the working sessions designed to tackle the shared practical challenges operators face. NEI will bring the nuclear C-suite presence along with the freshest insights on industrywide issues.

The U.S. nuclear industry is growing, and we need to get even bigger if we are going to make good on the promise of a resurgence. The auto industry has SEMA, the tech industry has CES. It’s time the U.S. nuclear industry had its top event of the year.

A new webinar series launched by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Department of Nuclear Energy, the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, and the Energy Communities Alliance (ECA) will discuss global progress toward a permanent solution for high-level waste and spent nuclear fuel, with presentations by senior representatives of national HLW and SNF management programs around the world.

Register for the first webinar here.