COP29 was good for nuclear energy, but not so good for anything else.

That was one of Seth Grae’s takeaways from this year’s Conference of the Parties—or, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—held for two weeks in November in Baku, Azerbaijan. Grae, chief executive of Lightbridge Corporation and chair of the American Nuclear Society’s International Council, attended with four other ANS delegates: ANS President Lisa Marshall, Gale Hauck, Shirly Rodriguez, and Andrew Smith.

A new complaint filed by Constellation asks the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to order the PJM Interconnection to provide rules for co-located generation to serve large facilities, such as data centers.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management will soon, for the first time, begin using drones to internally inspect radioactive liquid waste tanks at the department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Inspections were previously done using magnetic wall-crawling robots.

The July 2024 issue of Nuclear News focused on fusion. Editor-in-chief Rick Michal highlighted in his column (p. 4) Los Alamos National Laboratory’s open access special issue of the American Nuclear Society journal Fusion Science and Technology, titled The Early History of Fusion. This article provides a brief summary of the issue—and we encourage readers to explore all of the full papers.^a

Argonne National Laboratory will play a leading role in planning and rebuilding a nuclear-generated clean energy infrastructure for postwar Ukraine as part of the lab’s focus on developing small modular reactor applications to help countries meet energy security goals. The latest plans, described in a November 19 article, were announced on November 16 at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan.

The American Nuclear Society will be presenting the online Supplier Showcase “5 Critical Approaches to Accelerate Advanced Nuclear Enterprise Success with Digital Transformation” on Thursday, December 5, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. (EST). The session will be hosted by Dassault Systèmes.

Registration for the program, which is open to all, is required.

Katrina McMurrian

As the nation confronts increasing demand for clean, baseload energy, nuclear power today receives substantial bipartisan support, but nuclear waste remains a trusty arrow in the quiver of opponents. The U.S. should work to make nuclear waste a nonissue not only to support opportunities for nuclear power expansion but primarily to meet long--standing obligations. Federal government inaction to remove and dispose of commercial spent nuclear fuel (SNF) continues to negatively impact host communities in 36 states; electric customers in more than 40 states who paid billions of dollars into the Nuclear Waste Fund; and all U.S. taxpayers, who pay about $2 million per day for the government’s partial breach.

Marzano

The U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted 10–9 last week to advance the nomination of Matthew Marzano to serve on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It was a party-line vote, with all Democrats supporting Marzano and all Republicans voting “no.”

Marzano was nominated by President Biden in July to fill the open NRC seat, and the EPW Committee held a hearing in September on his nomination. His nomination will now go to the Senate for a vote, but it is not certain whether that will happen before the end of the year, in which case his nomination process would start over in 2025.

The five-member commission has been without a tiebreaker vote since June 2023 when Jeff Baran’s term expired.

Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers have performed a critical experiment using high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) TRISO fuel. It is the nation’s first criticality safety experiment using HALEU fuel in more than 20 years. On November 21, LANL announced the work of its Deimos team, which earlier this year carried out an experiment at the National Criticality Experiments Research Center (NCERC), operated by LANL at the Nevada National Security Site.

Radiant Industries has announced a $100 million Series C funding round to be used primarily to complete its Kaleidos Development Unit (KDU) microreactor for testing in Idaho National Laboratory's Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments (DOME) facility within two years.