The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has awarded BWX Technologies a contract valued at $1.5 billion to build a Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment (DUECE) pilot plant in Tennessee in support of the administration’s efforts to build out a domestic supply of unobligated enriched uranium for defense-related nuclear fuel.

The Department of Energy announced on Wednesday that it has awarded $134 million in funding for two programs designed to secure U.S. leadership in emerging fusion technologies and innovation. The funding was awarded through the DOE’s Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) program in the Office of Science and will support the next round of Fusion Innovation Research Engine (FIRE) collaboratives and the Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE) awards.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently announced that David Wright, after being nominated by President Trump and confirmed by the Senate, was ceremonially sworn in as NRC chair on September 8.

This swearing in comes more than a month after Wright began his third term on the commission; he began leading as chair July 31. His term will conclude on June 30, 2030.

Since the Department of Energy kicked off a 10-company race with its Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program to bring test reactors on line by July 4, 2026, the industry has been waiting for new headlines proclaiming progress. Aalo Atomics broke ahead of the pack first by announcing last week that it had broken ground on its 10-MWe Aalo-X at Idaho National Laboratory.

Late last week saw two announcements from companies working to recycle used nuclear fuel on a commercial scale, providing welcome news to anyone hoping to see the United States move to unlock the hidden potential of the more than 94,000 metric tons of spent fuel stored at power plant sites around the country.

The Department of Energy announced recently it will provide more than $35 million for 42 projects to help move emerging energy technologies from DOE national laboratories, plants, and sites related to grid security, artificial intelligence, nuclear energy, and advanced manufacturing to the marketplace. The selected projects will leverage over $21 million in cost-share from private and public partners, bringing total funding to more than $57.5 million.

A full list of the FY2025 selections is available here.

Eight days after Aalo Atomics released the details of its securing of $100 million in Series B funding, the company announced that it has broken ground on the 10-MWe Aalo-X. Sited in the desert beside Idaho National Laboratory, it will be the company’s first nuclear power plant, and it remains on track to go on line by July 4, 2026.

After the Trump administration’s new push to get a nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030 was first reported by Politico last month, media played up the shock value for people new to the concept. Few focused on the technical details of the new plan for lunar fission surface power (FSP), which halts and replaces a program that began under the first Trump administration with an early hope of getting a reactor on the moon by the end of 2026. Now, the focus is on streamlining NASA’s internal processes to support commercial space companies that can build a reactor with more than twice the power and mass and have it ready for launch by 2030.

As global interest in nuclear energy surges, the United States must remain at the forefront of research and development to ensure national energy security, advance nuclear technologies, and promote international cooperation on safety and nonproliferation. A crucial step in achieving this is analyzing how funding and resources are allocated to better understand how to direct future research and development. The Department of Energy has spearheaded this effort by funding hundreds of research projects across the country through the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP). This initiative has empowered dozens of universities to collaborate toward a nuclear-friendly future.

The Department of Energy made conditional commitments yesterday to provide high-assay low-enriched uranium to three companies: reactor developer Antares Nuclear; fuel fabricator Standard Nuclear; and Natura Resources, which is backing Abilene Christian University’s development of a small Molten Salt Research Reactor and pursuing a commercial reactor design of its own. Following a contracting process, some of the companies “could receive their HALEU later this year.”

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy will hold a webinar on August 27 from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. (EDT) to discuss commercial-scale facility and transportation criticality analyses for the high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel cycle.

Those interested in attending the workshop can register using this link.

It was near-certain that more good news was on the horizon for some of the 10 companies recently selected for the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program. Now, only one week later, one of those companies—Aalo Atomics—has become the first to make a major headline with its announcement that it has secured $100 million in Series B funding.

The Environmental Protection Agency has approved the addition of two new waste emplacement panels at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the Department of Energy’s geologic repository for defense-related transuranic waste in New Mexico.

As work progresses on the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program, which will progress through DOE authorization rather than Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing, three members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce have sent a critical letter to Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

The letter demands “information about the DOE and its employees’ dealings with the NRC and its staff” and expresses concern that DOE staff has “broken the firewall” between the departments.

Eleven high-burnup fuel rods manufactured by Global Nuclear Fuel have been delivered to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for a battery of destructive tests. PNNL’s evaluation will provide GNF and the Department of Energy with information about the performance of the fuel, which—like other fuels developed through the DOE’s Accident Tolerant Fuel program— was engineered to handle longer operating cycles, improve fuel cycle economics, and support power uprates for existing light water reactors.

The race to bring test reactors on line by July 4, 2026, got a boost today when the Department of Energy unveiled the names of 10 companies selected for the Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program—a new pathway that allows reactor authorization outside national labs.

As first outlined in one of the four executive orders on nuclear energy released by President Trump on May 23 and in the request for applications for the Reactor Pilot Program released June 18, the companies must use their own money and sites—and DOE authorization—to get reactors operating. What they won’t need is a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Science has committed $20 million to the University of Missouri that—with a matching $20 million from the state government—will support construction of a Radioisotope Science Center (RSC) at the university’s Discovery Ridge research park in Columbia, Mo., projected for completion in early 2029. The new facility will pair the DOE’s Office of Isotope R&D and Production (IRP)—formerly known as the DOE Isotope Program—with the decades of expertise developed at the University of Missouri Research Reactor (MURR).

Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org

For the past few years, I have been conducting a thoroughly unscientific, one-question poll of nuclear utility and supplier CEOs and senior executives: “What keeps you up at night?” The number one answer is—and has been from the beginning—“Workforce.”

The ongoing shortage of skilled labor—welders, pipefitters, electricians, and the like—almost always gets top billing in nuclear workforce discussions. In April 2025, the U.S. had an eye-popping 600,000 unfilled positions in the construction and manufacturing sectors. This consistent supply gap feeds a continuing talent war that has pushed craft wages up 20 percent since the end of the COVID pandemic, straining project budgets and profit margins alike.

Perhaps the most underappreciated gap in the nuclear workforce is professional and business services. It is the second-largest employment category in the nuclear industry, according to the Department of Energy’s 2024 U.S. Energy & Employment Report.

A report just released by Idaho National Laboratory reviews decades of radiation protection standards and research on the health effects of low-dose radiation and recommends that the current U.S. annual occupational dose limit of 5,000 mrem be maintained without applying ALARA—the “as low as reasonably achievable” regulatory concept first introduced in 1971—below that threshold.

Noting that epidemiological studies “have consistently failed to demonstrate statistically significant health effects at doses below 10,000 mrem delivered at low dose rates,” the report also recommends “future consideration of increasing this limit to 10,000 mrem/year with appropriate cumulative-dose constraints.”

The United States has tight new deadlines—18 months, max—for licensing commercial reactor designs. The Department of Energy is marshaling the nuclear expertise and high-performance computing assets of its national laboratories, in partnership with private tech companies, to develop generative AI tools and large-scale simulations that could help get nuclear reactor designs through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing process—or the DOE’s own reactor pilot program. “Accelerate” and “streamline” are the verbs of choice in recent announcements from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory, as they describe plans with Atomic Canyon, Microsoft, and Amazon.