Cavendish Nuclear has completed the handover of the Silos Maintenance Facility at the UK's Sellafield site. The plant will support the retrieval of waste from the site's legacy silos.

Bulgaria's State Enterprise Radioactive Waste has awarded a further three-year extension to the Decommissioning-Repository Project Management Unit Consultant contract to the Empresarios Agrupados/Nuvia Consortium. The contract will now run through to 2022.

Japan's Toshiba Energy Systems & Solutions Corporation has developed oxidation-reduction treatment technology that enables certain elements to be extracted from vitrified high-level radioactive waste. The technology will allow for the reuse of those elements and a reduction in the volume of high-level waste to be disposed of.

The US Administration's budget request for fiscal 2020, which begins on 1 October, seeks to restart the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing procedure for the Yucca Mountain geologic repository and also provides for the regulator to prepare for licensing advanced reactors.
 

Installation has been completed of the equipment needed to remove material from the Pile Fuel Cladding Silo at the Sellafield site in the UK. Demonstration removal of waste is scheduled for later this year, with larger scale removal operations set to start in 2020.

Installation of a final cover has marked the end of physical work associated with the demolition of a former vitrification plant at the US Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management's West Valley Demonstration Project, the only commercial nuclear fuel reprocessing plant to have operated in the USA.

Ondraf/Niras, the Belgian agency for the management of radioactive waste, yesterday submitted a completed licence application for the construction of a low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste disposal facility at Dessel.

Work to stabilise a 1688-foot (515-metre) long tunnel containing contaminated equipment from historic plutonium production activities at the US Department of Energy's Hanford site in Washington State is over 75% complete.

The return to service of all seven uranium conversion production lines enabled the US Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management to convert over 5000 tonnes of depleted uranium hexafluoride - more than half its yearly target - to a more stable form within the first three months of fiscal 2019.

Berkeley, California-based private company Deep Isolation has successfully placed and then retrieved a prototype nuclear waste canister hundreds of metres underground via a borehole, in a test the company described as the first of its kind.

A permit for the expansion of the existing SFR repository for low- and intermediate-level waste should be granted under the Sweden's Environmental Code, the country's Radiation Safety Authority has recommended to the Land and Environment Court in Stockholm.

Entergy Corporation has completed the sale of Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee to subsidiaries of NorthStar Group Services, which will decommission the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station site.