A two-year effort by Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management and contractor Isotek to process and dispose of a low-dose inventory of uranium-233 stored at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee has been completed. As well as eliminating legacy nuclear material the effort has also provided nuclear isotopes for next-generation cancer treatment research.

NuScale Power and Romanian national nuclear company Nuclearelectrica yesterday signed a teaming agreement to advance the deployment of NuScale's small modular reactor technology in Romania. The signing came a day after plans for the cooperation were announced on the sidelines of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow.

Framatome yesterday announced its first 100% accident tolerant fuel assembly has been delivered to Exelon Generation's Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant in Maryland, USA. The assembly - described by the company as a nuclear industry "first" - was loaded into one of the plant's two pressurised water reactors during a recent refuelling outage.

The preliminary design of X-energy's TRISO-X Fuel Fabrication Facility to produce tri-structural isotropic fuel on a commercial scale has now been completed, X-energy and Centrus Energy Corp announced today. The companies have also signed a contract for nuclear fuel and services provider Centrus to continue its work as the project enters its next phase.

The US Air Force has confirmed the Eielson base in Alaska as the facility planned to host its first small nuclear power plant. A microreactor of up to 5 MWe could be operational there as soon as 2027, according to Eielson.

Georgia Power has shifted back by three months the schedule for the Vogtle 3 and 4 expansion project, citing the need for extra time to address construction challenges and to allow for comprehensive testing. An in-service date in the third quarter of 2022 is now projected for Vogtle 3, with Vogtle 4's in-service date set for the second quarter of 2023.

Lightbridge Ltd has completed work to design an experiment for the irradiation of samples of its metallic fuel material in the Advanced Test Reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory. The work was carried out in collaboration with INL under the US Department of Energy's Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear voucher programme and marks a milestone towards testing of the material in the reactor.

A USD50 million cost-shared award from the US Department of Energy will see Exelon Generation's Limerick plant in Pennsylvania become the first nuclear power station in the USA to upgrade to a fully digital safety system. Control room digitalisation will enable automation, decrease system interruptions, and improve performance, ultimately improving operations and significantly reducing costs.

Separate domestic and international initiatives to support the development and production of medical radioisotopes have been announced in Canada, Germany, Japan and the USA. These include a federal award of USD35 million to support the commercial production of molybdenum-99 in the USA; a new linear accelerator-based technique for production of actinium-225 in Japan; and a Canadian-German collaboration to explore the production of Ac-225.

Mining of the eighth panel at the US Department of Energy's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico has been completed, seven years after work began. Emplacement of transuranic waste in the newly mined panel is expected to begin in April 2022.

The continued operation of Dominion's Millstone nuclear power plant beyond 2029 is a critical factor in how much more and how quickly Connecticut needs to procure new clean energy additions, the state's Department of Energy and Environmental Protection has told policymakers in the state's newly released 2020 Integrated Resources Plan.

A project to demonstrate the production of clean hydrogen energy from nuclear power at the Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Arizona is to receive USD20 million in federal funding as part of US Department of Energy efforts to reduce the cost of clean hydrogen to USD1 per kilogram. The announcement comes as DOE marks Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Day.