Amy Whitley has been selected by the American Nuclear Society and American Society of Mechanical Engineers to receive the 2025 ANS/ASME Barry Sloane Memorial Scholarship. The scholarship, which was established in 2024 to recognize an undergraduate student pursuing a degree in mechanical or nuclear engineering, honors contributions of the late Barry Sloane, a past member of the ANS/ASME Joint Committee on Nuclear Risk Management (JCNRM).

Curiosity landed on Mars sporting a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) in 2012, and a second NASA rover, Perseverance, landed in 2021. Both are still rolling across the red planet in the name of science. Another exploratory craft with a similar plutonium-238–fueled RTG but a very different mission—to fly between multiple test sites on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon—recently got one step closer to deployment.

On April 25, NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) announced that the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s icy moon passed its critical design review. “Passing this mission milestone means that Dragonfly’s mission design, fabrication, integration, and test plans are all approved, and the mission can now turn its attention to the construction of the spacecraft itself,” according to NASA.

Idaho National Laboratory is looking for a sponsor to invest $5 million–$10 million in a privately funded innovation incubator to support seed-stage start-ups working in nuclear energy, integrated energy systems, cybersecurity, or advanced materials. For their investment, the sponsor gets access to what INL calls “a turnkey source of cutting-edge American innovation.” Not only are technologies supported by the program “substantially de-risked” by going through technical review and development at a national laboratory, but the arrangement “adds credibility, goodwill, and visibility to the private sector sponsor’s investments,” according to INL.

The International Atomic Energy Agency announced that its Nuclear Technology for Controlling Plastic Pollution (NUTEC Plastics) initiative has partnered with Ecuador’s Oceanographic Institute of the Navy (INOCAR) and Polytechnic School of the Coast (ESPOL) to build microplastic monitoring and analytical capacity to address the growing threat of marine microplastic pollution in the Galapagos Islands.

Here is a recap of industry happenings from the recent past:

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TerraPower’s Natrium reactor advances on several fronts

TerraPower has continued making aggressive progress in several areas for its under-construction Natrium Reactor Demonstration Project since the beginning of the year. Natrium is an advanced 345-MWe reactor that has liquid sodium as a coolant, improved fuel utilization, enhanced safety features, and an integrated energy storage system, allowing for a brief power output boost to 500-MWe if needed for grid resiliency. The company broke ground for its first Natrium plant in 2024 near a retiring coal plant in Kemmerer, Wyo.

The American Nuclear Society presented the Illinois Institute of Technology with a plaque last week to officially designate the Armour Research Foundation Reactor a Nuclear Historic Landmark, following the Society’s decision to confer the status onto the reactor in September 2024.

DTE Energy, the owner of Fermi nuclear power plant in Michigan, is considering an extended uprate for Unit 2 that would increase its 1,100-MW generation capacity by 150 MW.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has awarded a five-year contract worth up to $74.8 million to Independent Strategic Management Solutions for professional support services at the Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management site in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Gov. Katie Hobbs put the brakes on legislation that would have eliminated some of Arizona’s regulations and oversight of small modular reactors, technology that is largely under consideration by data centers and heavy industrial power users.

Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) recently approved two new American Nuclear Society standards covering different aspects of nuclear criticality safety (NCS).

Spring marks the passing of the torch for American Nuclear Society leadership. During this election cycle, ANS members voted for the newest vice president/president-elect, treasurer, and six board of director positions (four U.S., one non-U.S., one student). New professional division leadership was also decided on in this election, which opened February 25 and closed April 15. About 21 percent of eligible members of the Society voted—a similar turnout to last year.

Utah-based waste management company EnergySolutions announced that it has signed a memorandum of understating with the Intermountain Power Agency and the state of Utah to explore the development of advanced nuclear power generation at the Intermountain Power Project (IPP) site near Delta, Utah.

Advanced nuclear company Oklo Inc. has new leadership for its board of directors as billionaire Sam Altman is stepping down from the position he has held since 2015. The move is meant to open new partnership opportunities with OpenAI, where Altman is CEO, and other artificial intelligence companies.

Pacific Fusion has a staff that knows its way around pulsers and inertial fusion, and an ongoing collaboration with General Atomics. Today, the two companies are announcing plans to test Pacific Fusion’s pulser-driven inertial fusion energy concept, with commercial fusion power as the goal.

“We are building a fusion machine and testing all equipment—including components and a pulser module—at our Pacific Fusion test center,” Pacific Fusion cofounder and chief technology officer Keith LeChien told Nuclear News. “GA’s engineering expertise remains an important part of our progress, and we expect this collaboration to continue through future phases of development.”

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Nuclear Plasma and Radiation Engineering (NPRE) Department announced yesterday that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved a fuel qualification methodology topical report for the high-temperature gas-cooled reactor the university wants to construct. The topical report was prepared by Ultra Safe Nuclear and submitted by UIUC to the NRC in March 2024. It describes the fuel that would be used in the microreactor that UIUC plans to host—initially containing uranium enriched to 9.9 percent U-235—and how it would be tested. The NRC issued its approval and a final safety evaluation on April 1.

Framatome announced that it has inaugurated a new workshop dedicated to the fabrication of fuel for research reactors and targets for medical isotopes at the company’s Romans-sur-Isère site in France. The workshops are part of Framatome’s CERCA division, which manufactures fuel and irradiation targets for research reactors.

ANS President Lisa Marshall recently sat down with Phil Zeringue, vice president of strategic partnerships at Nuclearn.ai to talk about the evolving state of education in the nuclear world.

Lawmakers are crossing the aisle to back proposals to expand nuclear power and nuclear research in the Badger State, especially as energy-hungry data center projects advance in Wisconsin and projections for energy demand soar.

The state has a goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 but will also need to generate more power to support data center plans, such as those being discussed in Port Washington and Beaver Dam, according to media reports.

Nuclear energy produces about 9 percent of the world’s electricity and 19 percent of the electricity in the United States, which has 94 operating commercial nuclear reactors with a capacity of just under 97 gigawatts-electric. Each reactor replaces a portion of its nuclear fuel every 18 to 24 months. Once removed from the reactor, this spent (or used) nuclear fuel (SNF or UNF) is stored in a spent fuel pool (SFP) for a few years then transferred to dry storage.