The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) facility is one of hundreds of old, contaminated buildings at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee that are slated to be taken down.

Washington state has trouble on the horizon—trouble with its electrical grid. Trouble as in not being reliable. Trouble as in big risks of rolling blackouts.

The trouble stems from attempts to decarbonize our society. Getting rid of coal, oil, and gas in generating electricity is the low-hanging fruit, but just getting rid of them without a realistic plan to replace them will do more harm than good.

GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy announced May 9 that it intends to transfer ownership of the 1,600-acre GEH Vallecitos Nuclear Center to NorthStar Group Services for nuclear decontamination, decommissioning, and environmental site restoration.

Amy Roma

Flipping on a light switch and knowing that the power will come on is a luxury. While it sounds like a simple act, it is achieved through deliberate government policies that ensure our electricity comes from a mix of sources, some of which are continuously operational—such as nuclear and gas—and some of which only operate at certain times—such as wind and solar. If any one source is unavailable or overly expensive, another source needs to deliver on demand. Diversity of energy sources ensures the grid is able to adapt and recover from changing conditions so that we can always flip the lights on.

While grid resilience—the grid’s ability to anticipate, absorb, and recover from major disruptions and rapidly restore electric service in their wake—is a matter of paramount importance, the source diversity required to achieve this is at risk. For power grids relying on renewables, supply and demand hang in a balance based on time of day and weather.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued a license to Holtec International to construct and operate a consolidated interim storage facility (CISF) for spent nuclear fuel in southeastern New Mexico. Holtec is proposing building the facility, called the HI-STORE CISF, between the cities of Carlsbad and Hobbs in Lea County on land provided by the Eddy Lea Energy Alliance (ELEA).

With funding from the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), the International Atomic Energy Agency is working to help developing countries scale up their cancer care capacities in radiotherapy, the agency said. A multilateral development bank, IsDB works to improve lives by promoting social and economic development in 57 member states and Muslim communities around the world.

Helion Energy, based in Everett, Wash., today announced an agreement to use its first fusion power plant to provide electricity to Microsoft. Constellation, which operates 21 commercial nuclear reactors in the United States, will serve as the power marketer and will manage transmission for the project.

The Department of Energy yesterday announced the awarding of $22.1 million to 10 industry-led nuclear projects, including two aimed at expanding clean hydrogen production and one at advancing a microreactor design. Other projects selected for funding are focused on addressing nuclear regulatory hurdles, improving existing reactor operation, and facilitating new advanced reactor developments.

Abstracts for all 10 projects can be found here.

Savannah River National Laboratory and Augusta University have announced a new agreement that formalizes a long-standing partnership and expands on a shared mission to address global security issues.

A recent multinational survey of attitudes toward nuclear energy has found widespread public support for advanced nuclear technologies in countries around the world, according to the 50-page report The World Wants New Nuclear, released yesterday by nongovernmental organizations ClearPath, Third Way, Potential Energy Coalition, and RePlanet.

The report is based on a large-scale online quantitative survey across three continents, among 13,500 members of the general public. Nationally representative samples were surveyed for each of eight nations—France, Germany, Japan, Poland, South Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States—between November 2022 and January 2023.

Meredith Angwin

When my book Shorting the Grid was published in 2020, many described it as “alarmist.” Most people in the United States took grid reliability for granted. Sure, there were always power outages during storms, but weird things like “rolling blackouts” only happened in California.

Public perception is changing, however. Part of this change is due to the major February 2021 blackout in Texas, as well as the grid emergencies during December 2022. People became aware that their own grid could have problems, and not just the usual power-line-fails-in-a-snowstorm type of problems. For example, last December, the service areas for Duke Energy and the Tennessee Valley Authority in the southeastern U.S. experienced rolling blackouts. Grid operators had to take emergency measures. The Midwest, Texas, and New England experienced near misses with grid trouble. In other words, most of the country was at risk of rolling blackouts due to one relatively short winter storm.

The Great Lakes Clean Hydrogen Hub coalition (GLCH) has submitted an application for funding from the $8 billion Department of Energy program authorized by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to support the creation of regional clean hydrogen hubs, nuclear plant owner/operator Energy Harbor announced on May 2.

Work crews at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina recently replaced a motor on a crane in the 70-year-old H Canyon Chemical Separations Facility. H Canyon is the only production-scale, radiologically shielded chemical separations plant in operation in the United States.

Nuclear power is the single largest source of clean energy in the United States, but how can the value of “clean” be measured? Two recent reports by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, respectively, measured the clean energy benefits of nuclear energy in different ways: the benefits to human health from the air pollution avoided and the future economic value of avoided carbon emissions.

Hageman

Cole

Sarah Elizabeth Cole of Boise State University and Abbey Hageman of the University of Nevada–Reno were recently selected as the American Nuclear Society participants in the 2023 Washington Internships for Students in Engineering (WISE) program. Cole is majoring in materials science and engineering and expects to graduate in the spring of 2025; Hageman is majoring in materials engineering with minors in mechanical engineering and mathematics and has a graduation date of spring 2024. These two scholars will join students sponsored by other engineering organizations for nine weeks throughout the summer.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is issuing a request for information (RFI) aimed at understanding the current state-of-art radiological survey methods used to comply with decommissioning and license termination requirements. According to the commission, the information will help its staff better understand trends in radiological survey instrumentation and data analysis, including those used to survey both surface and subsurface residual radioactivity.

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed a method of using augmented reality (AR) to create accurate visual representations of ionizing radiation, and that technology has just been licensed by Teletrix, a Pittsburgh, Pa.-based firm that develops simulators to train radiological workers and radiological control technicians. ORNL announced the news on May 4.

The main construction phase for Unit 3 at Egypt’s El Dabaa nuclear power plant project has begun, Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy corporation Rosatom announced last week.

On December 20, 1951, researchers used energy produced by Experimental Breeder Reactor-I near Arco, Idaho, to illuminate four 200-watt lightbulbs. Since then, utilities have built commercial nuclear power plants in the United States almost exclusively to generate electricity. This has worked well alongside other power generation and transmission infrastructure—large oil- and coal-fired, natural gas turbine or hydroelectric plants, and a relatively simple electrical grid designed to deliver reliable power.

Humanity is now embarking on an epic and complex energy transformation across the grid, industry, and transportation. Renewables like wind and solar are contributing an increasing share of carbon-free electricity to the grid, but that contribution is variable and hard to predict—sometimes those sources produce more electricity than the grid needs, and sometimes less.

Earlier this year, the American Nuclear Society's newly formed Special Committee on Certification started conducting market research with the help of a third party contractor to determine the viability of a nuclear certification program. An initial survey was sent to the membership back in March with the goal of determining what certification programs were already available and what type of certification program ANS could develop to benefit the community.