The global nuclear revival, which is fueled by unprecedented demand for firm, affordable, dispatchable power for artificial intelligence and data center build-out, energy security imperatives, and climate commitments, has exposed a structural reality of the Western fuel cycle: No single allied nation currently possesses the full suite of front-end capabilities. From mining through conversion, enrichment, fabrication, and the emerging deconversion and metallization steps required for reactor fuels, capability is distributed across Canada, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States (collectively, the “Sapporo Five”), as well as a small group of close partners.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have measured how diamond melts under extreme pressures, resolving a long-standing discrepancy between experiment and theory. In inertial confinement fusion experiments, where a diamond capsule is used to hold fuel, this refined understanding of diamond’s phase change has the potential to triple energy gain, provided that other degradation mechanisms can be controlled.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management reports that workers at the Hanford Site, near Richland, Wash., have performed a technically complex operation to remove a large legacy mixer pump from Tank SY-101 in the 200 West Area. The removal allows for the future installation of tank waste retrieval equipment as part of the next phase of waste cleanup at the site.

A short video on the Hanford Site’s YouTube channel shows aspects of the operation, including the pump being lifted out of the tank with a specially designed hydraulic lift system named Hercules.

Romania has taken its last operating reactor off line due to the record-low water levels of the Danube River, in what is the latest example of how the historic heat wave gripping Europe has impacted the river levels and water temperatures needed to operate nuclear power plants across the continent. The situation is not isolated to Romania, however, as power plants in Hungary and France are also facing challenges.

Results of a two-year study of groundwater levels at the site of the planned Environmental Management Disposal Facility (EMDF) in Oak Ridge, Tenn., have been released, revealing that the levels fell at a slower-than-expected rate. The collection of data on groundwater levels during two wet seasons, conducted by the Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management and the contractor United Cleanup Oak Ridge, formed the core of a groundwater field demonstration study which will help inform the final design of the EMDF landfill.

Yesterday, Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced that the Department of Energy has committed funding to develop a fusion breeding blanket test facility at the lab in partnership with Kyoto Fusioneering, and the company announced it will be relocating its U.S. headquarters to Oak Ridge, Tenn., with support from the state of Tennessee’s Nuclear Energy Supply Chain Investment Fund.

Constellation signed new long-term power purchase agreements during the second quarter that will ultimately provide roughly 920 MW in nuclear power to these new partners.

These nuclear contracts were among the topics Constellation executives broached during the second-quarter earnings call, along with existing power generation, the Crane restart, and New York and Illinois’s nuclear energy plans.

On August 11, Elemental Nuclear announced that the Department of Energy, through Sandia National Laboratories, approved its entrance into a Strategic Partnership Project. The SPP will support the development of Elemental’s supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO₂)–based Brayton cycle generator systems.

Researchers conducted experiments in Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory’s Lithium Tokamak Experiment-Beta (LTX-β) showing glow discharge cleaning can be used to effectively clean samples of porous tungsten—used to hold liquid lithium in fusion machine inner walls—manufactured from powder-reconstituted materials, according to a paper published in Nuclear Materials and Energy.

Tungsten is widely used for plasma-facing components in fusion machines, especially in the divertor region where materials must withstand extreme levels of power flow. According to the paper, spark plasma sintering can be used to make tungsten into spongelike samples for holding liquid lithium.

The Department of Energy has reported that its Hanford Field Office has submitted two permit modification requests to the Washington State Department of Ecology that could speed up the cleanup of the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. The requests “represent the latest step in a science-backed dual glass-plus-grout strategy to eliminate risks posed by aging tanks and meet cleanup commitments to the people of Washington more quickly, safely and efficiently,” the DOE said.

The fourth unit of Slovakia’s Mochovce nuclear power plant has achieved criticality, operator Slovenské Elektrárne has announced. Unit 4 reached the milestone at 10:10 p.m. local time on August 6. Twenty-one minutes later, the reactor reached its minimum controlled power level.

In recent weeks, states around the nation have taken various steps forward in the development of their nuclear sectors, including in Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, and Utah. Read on for a roundup of events.

Dozens of elected officials in California are urging Gov. Gavin Newsom and the California Legislature to act this year to extend operations at Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant past 2030.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has proposed a change to how it will approach standards for radiation protections, notably including the elimination of the “as low as reasonably achievable” (ALARA) principle. The proposed change was published in the Federal Register on July 15, and yesterday the agency held a public meeting on the topic.

In the meeting, Mike Franovich, director of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research, gave a presentation summarizing the changes, and NRC staff answered questions from participants. The meeting facilitator, Lance Rakovan, described it as a “very popular meeting,” drawing more than 550 participants, and the NRC staff was unable to address all questions in the scheduled time.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s proposed rule on modernizing reactor licensing, safety oversight, and siting practices ran over 550 pages when it was unveiled in July. To address the massive rulemaking, the NRC held three meetings last week to address all the topics.

At the third and final meeting, NRC staff addressed license and permit durations, 10 CFR Parts 52 and 54 enhancements, changes to emergency preparedness, and decommissioning financial assurances for new reactor applicants.

Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org

Who would have thought, just a few years ago, that we would see so many long-standing barriers to new nuclear development falling like dominoes? Public opinion, policy, regulatory reform, finance and investment, design maturity, nuclear fuel enrichment, and fuel fabrication capacity have all advanced with remarkable speed in the United States.

Conventional wisdom holds that the most effective way to scale up the nuclear supply chain is to do so strategically, matching investments to the needs of reactor developers.

Recent research out of the United Kingdom and Germany is offering promising advances in the understanding of fusion plasmas, potentially bringing the dream of commercial fusion energy closer to reality.

Mark Peters
president@ans.org

One month into my term as president of the American Nuclear Society, it is already clear that the nuclear field continues to move quickly. June alone brought a striking number of developments, each one pointing to the momentum of this moment.

Antares’s Mark-0 microreactor reaching criticality at Idaho National Laboratory was more than a technical milestone. It effectively brought reactor No. 53 on line at a site that has shaped much of the nation’s nuclear history, with 52 reactors built there since 1951. And more criticality starts were delivered in June and July, enabled by the Department of Energy and its partnerships with private companies.

At the same time, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is continuing its broad regulatory reform effort, and nuclear technology is being used to help combat an outbreak of New World screwworm that has spread to the United States.

A pair of bills were introduced earlier this month in Congress that could modernize the licensing process for uranium enrichment facilities and repeal the law that designated Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the country’s nuclear waste repository.

The “world’s first industrial-scale final disposal facility for spent nuclear fuel,” planned for the Finnish island of Olkiluoto, has received a favorable safety assessment from the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority of Finland (STUK). Ilkka Poikolainen, the president and CEO of Posiva, the waste management company that has been developing the Onkalo facility for decades, characterized the assessment as “a highly significant and positive milestone in the operating license process.”