The International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Bank Group (WBG) recently provided an update on their partnership’s progress at the one-year mark. That partnership, entered into only weeks after the World Bank reversed its long-standing ban on nuclear power investment, aims to facilitate new financing and construction of advanced nuclear projects in developing countries.

The American Nuclear Society recently opened a draft standard for public review.

ANS-8.22-202x, Nuclear Criticality Safety Based on Limiting and Controlling Moderators, is a revision of ANS-8.22-1997 and provides criteria for limiting and controlling moderators in operations with fissile materials.

Here is a recap of recent industry happenings:

ADVANCED REACTOR MARKETPLACE

Hadron Energy advances its Halo reactor plans

Hadron Energy has completed its previously announced business combination with GigCapital7 Corp. The corporate combination resulted in Hadron, which is developing a microreactor called Halo, receiving a total cash value of approximately $31 million from the GigCapital7 trust account and other financing, as well as public market access to support the company’s plans to see the Halo MMR through design, regulation, and customer-deployment.

Hadron has also signed a uranium conversion services agreement with ConverDyn, the Solstice Advanced Materials–General Atomics joint venture behind Solstice’s uranium hexafluoride conversion facility in Metropolis, Ill.

Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) has implemented a pilot program that introduces a new approach to maintenance planning and control processes at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The program, which is initially being used to support environmental management operations at the SRS H Canyon complex, is a “graded, risk-based approach that prioritizes urgency and aligns controls with three defined hazard levels [low, medium, and high].”

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is proposing changes to its environmental review regulations under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) that agency officials call the most significant in decades.

The proposed rule—published in the Federal Register on Tuesday—streamlines 10 CFR Part 51 and calls for no longer requiring draft environmental impact statements (EIS), adding new categorical exclusions that exempt licensing actions from NEPA review, and reducing the regulatory burden in its environmental reviews, among other things. The NRC will accept public comments on the proposed rulemaking until August 21, with plans to hold a public hearing during the comment period.

On July 7, SpaceX launched Transporter-17, a smallsat rideshare mission containing 81 payloads. One of the payloads was the Betavoltaic Orbital High-Reliability (BOHR) satellite developed by City Labs.

According to the company, BOHR is “the world’s first commercial nuclear-powered satellite and first nuclear CubeSat.” The spacecraft also broke new ground in the regulatory process for launch approval for commercial nuclear projects.

The ongoing work to restart Holtec’s Palisades nuclear power plant, which last operated in 2022, has transitioned out of large-scale projects and into smaller activities, plant owner and operator Holtec International announced last week. However, no firm start date for the Covert, Mich., facility has been announced.

In 2023, more than 20 countries at the World Climate Action Summit of the 28th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28) set the goal of tripling global nuclear energy capacity by 2050. Now, a new report from the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency describes the daunting challenges involved in trying to meet that goal.

According to Nuclear Energy Outlook: Global Installed Capacity to 2050 and Beyond, expanding nuclear energy capacity to meet the COP28 target will require substantial acceleration in the growth of the nuclear workforce, supply chains, and financing availability. The report outlines four possible scenarios for how nuclear capacity could evolve by and past 2050: a “low” scenario, a “current trends” scenario, an “ambitious” scenario, and a “transformative” scenario.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected seven teams for its Rads to Watts program, setting off a competition to design radiovoltaic cells capable of providing power in extreme environments such as deep sea and space.

The teams are now working on developing a unit cell, simple demonstrations that their design ideas work. These are expected to be low power but capable of being scaled up into a higher-power array.

For more than seven decades, Leonardo DRS has supported some of the world’s most demanding nuclear applications. That legacy began with Consolidated Controls Corporation (CCC), founded in 1958, and evolved through decades of innovation supporting U.S. naval nuclear propulsion and commercial nuclear power generation. Today, as the nuclear industry enters a new era driven by plant modernization, advanced reactors, energy security, and maritime nuclear innovation, Leonardo DRS is uniquely positioned to help customers navigate the future with proven technology, nuclear-grade quality, and operationally grounded expertise.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration has released its Domestic Uranium Production Report for the first quarter of 2026. According to the report, U.S. production of uranium concentrate (U₃O₈) during the first quarter of this year totaled 1,039,075 pounds, representing a 0.4 percent decrease from the fourth quarter of 2025, when U₃O₈ production totaled 1,043,474 pounds. However, the 2026 first-quarter production was the highest first-quarter production amount recorded since 2015, when 1,154,408 pounds were produced.

For decades, U.S. radiation protection has rested on two pillars: the linear no-threshold (LNT) model and the principle of “as low as reasonably achievable” (ALARA). Together, these have shaped occupational dose management, regulatory limits, and emergency planning across the nuclear industry.

Synthos Green Energy, a development and investment company headquartered in Warsaw, Poland, has announced a proposal to deploy 14 GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy BWRX-300 small modular reactors at three multiunit sites in the United Kingdom. SGE has established SGE SMR UK Limited as its dedicated vehicle for this U.K. project, which reportedly could see private capital investment of up to £35 billion (about $46 billion).

Executive Order 14301 set an ambitious goal for at least three test reactors to achieve criticality by July 4. Two private companies participating in the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program—Antares and Valar Atomics—reached this stage earlier in June, and Deployable Energy—participating in the DOE's Nuclear Energy Launch Pad—became the third last week.

In the last few weeks, reports indicated that Aalo would be next, reaching criticality at Idaho National Laboratory with a low-enriched uranium–fueled, sodium-cooled reactor on or near the target date set forth by President Trump’s EO 14301. In the early hours of July 4, Aalo’s critical test reactor—a full-scale zero-power version of its planned 10-MWe Aalo-X—did just that, becoming the fourth DOE-authorized reactor to hit the milestone.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems, headquartered in Devens, Mass., has been selected by the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority as the first international partner for the agency’s Lithium Breeding Tritium Innovation (LIBRTI) program. LIBRTI is a U.K. government initiative with the goal of demonstrating the feasibility of fusion power plant–relevant fuel technologies.

The UKAEA is creating a first-of-a-kind technology facility, called the LIBRTI Facility, at its Culham Campus. It will house a test bed made of a 14-MeV neutron source in a shielded blockhouse. This structure will be surrounded by rooms for the assembly and disassembly of multiton breeder blanket prototypes.

In the latest twist in a long-term, multistep contracting arrangement with the Department of Energy, Centrus Energy has signed a contract to finalize terms of a $900 million DOE task order to expand production capacity for high-assay low-enriched uranium at its American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio. The expansion is part of Centrus’s multibillion-dollar capacity expansion that also includes low-enriched uranium.

The new DOE award allows the company to transition its HALEU production cascade to a commercial-scale operation at Piketon. The contract also includes options for as much $170 million in HALEU purchases for DOE missions, for a total contract value of $1.07 billion. Those options are subject to the discretion of DOE.

Realta Fusion announced it has achieved direct energy conversion at the Wisconsin HTS Axisymmetric Mirror (WHAM), powering a lightbulb using electricity extracted from charged particles emitted by the plasma.

This process, called direct energy conversion (DEC), was theorized by Richard Post, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and has been demonstrated experimentally a few times, the earliest being the “Venetian blind” converter in the 1970s.

On May 23, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14301, “Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the DOE,” which instructed the Department of Energy to create a Reactor Pilot Program (RPP)—a new system in which companies could pursue DOE authorization to build and test their first-of-a-kind nuclear technologies. EO 14301 set an ambitious goal for that program: three reactors achieving criticality by July 4, 2026.

A proposed rule from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would update radiation protection regulations and remove “as low as reasonably achievable” (ALARA) language without changing specific radiation exposure limits that are based on the linear no-threshold (LNT) model of low-dose radiation health effects. A second proposed rule would reform reactor licensing, safety oversight, and siting practices with changes the agency said are the most significant in years.

The NRC unveiled the two proposed rules on July 1 and published them in the ADAMS public document library the same day. The rules have not, at this writing, been published in the Federal Register, but once they are, each rule will be open for public comment for 45 days.

Researchers from the University of Manchester, the U.K. National Nuclear Laboratory, and Clemson University have studied using crushed concrete at legacy nuclear facilities as a long-term sink for strontium-90, a radioactive contaminant found at many such sites. Their research has been published in the American Chemical Society journal ACS ES&T Water.