With increasing demand for clean, reliable, and safe sources of energy, the conversation around nuclear energy is changing. And so too is the conversation around nuclear waste, even as the country struggles to find a path for the disposal of its spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. From community engagement, to recycling, to existing success around other forms of nuclear waste management, the conversation around nuclear waste has many different angles, and an executive session of the American Nuclear Society’s 2024 Annual Conference in Las Vegas aimed to delve into some of those discussions.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced that it has completed construction of the new large-scale ventilation system at its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.

The American Nuclear Society brought together 11 other energy and environmental advocacy organizations in calling on Congress to fund the Environmental Protection Agency to develop a new, technology-neutral, generic environmental standard for the disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste in the United States.

In a letter to the leaders of the House and Senate appropriations committees, the groups ask for an additional $3 million in fiscal year 2025 for the EPA’s Office of Radiation and Indoor Air to work on the new standard.

Switzerland’s national cooperative for the disposal of radioactive waste, Nagra, is distancing itself from recent reports regarding the work of the Geneva-based engineering start-up Transmutex, which claims to have developed a new technology for the transmutation of radioactive waste.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced that its Office of River Protection (ORP) recently created a plan with contractor Bechtel National for completing the High-Level Waste Facility at the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, also known as the Vit Plant.

The Department of Energy has received initial approval, known as “Critical Decision-0” (CD-0), for siting a federal consolidated interim storage facility for commercial spent nuclear fuel. Paul Murray, deputy assistant secretary of energy within the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, confirmed to Nuclear Newswire that the DOE received CD-0 approval on May 6.

The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an independent federal agency that evaluates the Department of Energy’s efforts to manage and dispose of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste, will hold a two-day public meeting May 21–22 to review information on the DOE’s research and development activities related to the disposal of SNF and HLW in crystalline host rocks and on the corrosion of commercial SNF after disposal.

The U.S. Department of Energy, Washington State Department of Ecology, and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have reached an agreement on revised plans for managing millions of gallons of radioactive and chemical liquid waste stored in 177 underground tanks at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash.

Registration is open for Argonne National Laboratory’s Facility Decommissioning Training Course, a four-day instruction designed for those responsible for the decontamination and decommissioning of nuclear facilities and who are looking to understand the full breadth and depth of the D&D processes.

The next session will be held July 16–19 in Santa Fe, N.M. Information on the course and how to register can be found here.

Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) research laboratory in Germany have investigated a microorganism capable of transforming water-soluble hexavalent uranium [U(VI)] to the less-mobile tetravalent uranium [U(IV)]. The researchers found that the sulfate-reducing bacterium Desulfosporosinus hippei, a relative of naturally occurring microorganisms present in clay rock and bentonite, showed a relatively fast removal of uranium from clay pore water.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management recently announced that crews at the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, also known as the Vit Plant, recently brought the second of two 300-ton melters up to the operating temperature of 2,100°F.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee announced a public hearing on improving the U.S. management of spent nuclear fuel. The hearing, titled “American Nuclear Energy Expansion: Spent Fuel Policy and Innovation,” will be held on April 10 by the E&C Energy, Climate, and Grid Security Subcommittee.

The hearing will be livestreamed on the E&C Committee website.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management celebrated a major milestone for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant last week, marking the 25th anniversary of the receipt of the first waste shipment at the disposal facility in New Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert.

By a narrow vote of 9–7, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals denied a petition to rehear the court’s 2023 decision to vacate Interim Storage Partners’ (ISP’s) license to build and operate a consolidated interim storage facility for commercial spent nuclear fuel in Andrews County, Texas.

The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (NWTRB), the independent federal agency tasked with reviewing the Department of Energy’s activities related to spent nuclear fuel management, issued a new report to Congress and the secretary of energy that examines the storage of spent fuel in dry storage casks at independent spent fuel storage installations (ISFSI).

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced that crews at the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, also known as the Vit Plant, recently installed 18 temporary startup heaters in the second of two melters in the plant’s Low-Activity Waste Facility.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced last week that, for calendar year 2023, the department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) had its best shipment performance in 10 years, having received 489 transuranic (TRU) waste shipments from generator sites throughout the country. For comparison, WIPP received only 272 shipments in 2022.

Nukem Technologies, a German-based radioactive waste management company, announced last week that it has successfully completed a mock-up for a state-of-the-art waste solidification plant. The plant will use the in-drum cementation process for encapsulating various types of radioactive waste into a solid, secure form suitable for long-term storage.

For the first time in a decade, crews have started mining a new disposal panel at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico, the nation’s deep geologic waste repository for defense-related transuranic waste.

The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration hopes to dispose of up to 34 metric tons of surplus defense-related plutonium at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico using a “dilute-and-dispose” strategy.