Posiva, the Finnish waste management company, said today it has started construction of a heavy plug for the demonstration repository tunnel at its final repository and waste encapsulation plant at Olkiluoto. The underground characterisation facility is known as Onkalo.

Westinghouse and German construction company Hochtief AG have teamed up to offer decommissioning, decontamination and remediation services for Germany's nuclear power plants.

The UK's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has published its latest business plan, setting out its anticipated income and expenditure during the next financial year. It also includes a high-level 20-year overview of objectives it is working towards, and takes a more detailed look at key activities over the next three years.

The contents of a failed waste barrel at the WIPP underground disposal site were "chemically incompatible", said the Department of Energy's technical report today, with a certain brand of cat litter playing a major role in the incident.

A new Department of Energy initiative on radioactive waste disposal could "finally bring some progress the nation's long-neglected nuclear waste management policy," said Marv Fertel, the head of US trade body the Nuclear Energy Institute.

The very first radioactive sludge has been removed from the First Generation Magnox Storage Pond (FGMSP) at Sellafield in north-west England. The FGMSP is one of the site's four Legacy Pond and Silo facilities.

The underground tunnel in which the Full-scale Emplacement Experiment will be carried out at the Mont Terri Rock Laboratory in Switzerland has been sealed and monitoring has begun. The experiment aims to simulate the conditions within a repository containing high-level radioactive waste.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission will prepare a supplement to the Department of Energy's environmental impact statement on the proposed geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The public were informed yesterday via a notice in the Federal Register.

The estimated cost of decommissioning and cleaning up the Sellafield site in the UK has increased to GBP53 billion ($81 billion), the National Audit Office has noted. The increase has been attributed to a better understanding of the tasks involved.

The transfer of radioactive soil and waste generated from clean-up work following the March 2011 accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant to a provisional storage site has been approved by the governor of Fukushima prefecture and the mayors of Futaba and Okuma.

Australian landholders have until 5 May to put forward potential sites for a national radioactive waste management facility under a voluntary site nomination process launched by the Australian government.

Finnish nuclear operators had set aside a total of €2.38 billion ($2.67 billion) by the end of 2014 - up from €2.27 billion ($2.55 billion) by the end of 2013 and €2.16 billion ($2.42 billion) by the end of 2012 - for waste disposal and decommissioning activities, the country's Ministry for Employment and the Economy has reported.