Plans to bring a university research reactor like no other to the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) were punctuated last fall by the news that Ultra Safe Nuclear, the developer of the gas-cooled reactor technology selected for the Illinois Microreactor Project, had declared bankruptcy.

Tokyo Electric Power Company is scheduled this week to begin retrieving a second sample of nuclear fuel debris from Unit 2 of Japan’s damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. This second retrieval comes after TEPCO improved the telescopic device used to gather samples.

Researchers at GE Hitachi Nuclear recently completed a successful test on potential new building blocks made of steel-concrete composite.

The 50th anniversary of the founding of the Latin American Section of the American Nuclear Society is today: April 14, 2025! LAS/ANS was created with the goal of representing the interests of the nuclear professionals of Latin America.

The Defense Innovation Unit announced April 10 next steps in the Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations (ANPI) program, launched in 2024 to deploy microreactor nuclear systems for increased power reliability at select military locations.

Jarrell

Roger Jarrell will lead the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management as the new principal deputy assistant secretary. Jarrell, who served in the office during the first Trump administration, was named DOE-EM senior advisor in January. Prior to that, he served as the general counsel and previously was the government and stakeholder interface at DOE cleanup contractor UCOR, of Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Jarrell takes over the assistant secretary position, listed on DOE-EM’s organizational chart as EM-2, from Dae Chung, a long-serving DOE-EM executive who was tapped by the Trump administration in March to lead the office as acting principal deputy assistant secretary following the departure of Candice Robertson, who had led the office since June 2024.

Mike Mlynarek believes in this expression: “In the end it will be OK; and if it’s not OK, it’s not the end.”

As the site vice president at Palisades nuclear power plant in Covert Township, Mich., Mlynarek is overseeing one of the most exciting projects in the United States nuclear power industry. If all goes according to plan, Holtec’s Palisades plant will be splitting atoms once again by the end of 2025 and become the first U.S. nuclear facility to restart after being slated for decommissioning.

Southern Nuclear recently loaded nuclear fuel with uranium-235 enriched up to 6 percent—higher than the usual 3–5 percent enrichment—into Vogtle-2 to test it through irradiation.

Jong Kim in 1994 . . .

How did I get interested in nuclear energy? I am a mechanical engineer by education, with a B.S. (Seoul National University), M.S. (University of Missouri), and Ph.D. (Caltech), and I am a nuclear engineer by profession.

After receiving my degree in 1971, I stayed on as a research fellow for two years and then moved to Penn State’s Garfield Thomas Water Tunnel, which at the time was the largest closed-loop tunnel in the world, as a research associate doing naval hydrodynamics research.

That was the year the infamous energy (oil) crisis hit. I thought that nuclear energy would become a critical pillar in energy security and independence. The nuclear profession looked promising. Brookhaven National Laboratory was hiring engineers to develop computer codes, so I decided to join the team and in 1975 became an associate engineer at BNL. This is how my long nuclear journey began.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy has posted a list of the advantages and challenges of using nuclear energy to power AI data centers, which some estimates suggest could consume as much as 12 percent of U.S. energy production by 2028. The DOE also posted a brief video on its YouTube channel to accompany the list.

Brandon Williams appeared before the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Armed Services this week to answer questions on how he would lead the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, if confirmed for the job.

President Donald Trump announced Williams as his pick for the NNSA role in January. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said he was personally involved in the selection of Williams for the role, telling the Exchange Monitor in January, “He’s a smart, passionate guy [who] wants to defend our country.”

The latest edition of Uranium 2024: Resources, Production and Demand, commonly known as the Red Book, reports that current uranium resources are sufficient to meet low- and high-growth nuclear capacity needs through 2050 and beyond, but that further development of resources is still required. Even if nuclear capacity remains stable at 2050 levels through the end of the century, the report noted that cumulative demand “could exceed the current identified uranium resource base of nearly 8 million tonnes by the 2080s under the low-growth demand scenario and by the 2110s under the high-growth demand scenario outlined in this edition.”

The Department of Energy has announced its first round of conditional commitments to provide high-assay low-enriched uranium to five U.S. nuclear developers. According to the DOE, the delivery of HALEU will support the commercialization of advanced nuclear technologies, aiming to deliver secure, affordable, and reliable energy to Americans.

Gary Adkins

Subsequent license renewal (SLR) authorizes nuclear power plants to operate for an additional 20 years beyond the 60 years of the initial license (years 1–40) and the first license renewal (years 41–60). NUREG-2191, Generic Aging Lessons Learned for Subsequent License Renewal (GALL-SLR), and NUREG-2192, Standard Review Plan for Review of Subsequent License Renewal Applications (SRP-SLR), were issued in July 2017 and provide guidance for generic evaluation of plant aging management programs and reviews of SLR applications, respectively, by Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff.

The first SLR application was submitted to the NRC for review in January 2018. A total of 10 additional SLR applications addressing 20 operating units have been submitted to the NRC. Nine operating units have been approved by the NRC, and 13 units are under review. These 22 units do not have any issues, including operating experience issues, precluding them from achieving a renewed license.

A bill that would create a nuclear energy task force in Delaware has passed the state Senate and is now being considered in the House of Representatives.

The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has announced its approval for Ontario Power Generation to construct a General Electric Hitachi BWRX-300 small modular reactor at its Darlington site in Clarington, Ontario.

The Department of Energy has announced that workers at its Savannah River Site in South Carolina recently removed legacy uranium materials from the site’s HB Line as part of an effort to clear the facility of its inventory of legacy nuclear materials. The removed legacy uranium was originally produced by the Y-12 National Security Complex at Oak Ridge, Tenn.

The American Nuclear Society’s 2025 Annual Conference will take place June 15–18 this year in Chicago at the Downtown Marriott. The conference is an opportunity to take part in one of the largest gatherings of nuclear professionals in the country and engage with leaders from across the nuclear science and technology landscape. In addition to an impressive list of government and industry leaders, ANS is also planning several outstanding hot-topic technical sessions and popular plenary speakers.

While attendance at the 2025 Waste Management Conference was noticeably down this year due to the ongoing federal retrenchment, the conference, held March 9-13 in Phoenix, Ariz., still drew a healthy and diverse crowd of people working on the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, both domestically and internationally.

Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org

This month’s Nuclear News pays tribute to the people and projects that keep our nuclear power plants running.

In the nuclear industry, “life extension” is a venerable term that broadly describes the care required to sustain the safe and efficient operation of large, complex energy generation facilities for decades to come, some of which you will read about in these pages.

Of late, however, the general concept of life extension has also taken a firmer hold in our societal consciousness.

Whether we absorb it from Instagram videos about some Silicon Valley techie’s quest for immortality or sense it in one of the thousands of dryly written journal articles documenting our increasing ability to control and change life at the molecular level, the promise of extended life and health has universal appeal—and it’s never seemed more within reach than it does right now.