The Californian Public Utilities Commission yesterday approved Pacific Gas & Electric's request to retire the state's only operating nuclear capacity - the two-unit Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant - by 2025.

A newly installed melter at the Defense Waste Processing Facility at the US Department of Energy's Savannah River site has poured its first canisters of vitrified radioactive waste.

The US nuclear regulator is satisfied that NuScale Power's small modular reactor (SMR) design can operate safely without the need for safety-related electrical systems. The reactor uses passive safety features, such as relying on convection, not pumps, to circulate water in the primary circuit.

The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission yesterday terminated proceedings on Energy Secretary Rick Perry's proposed rulemaking on grid resilience and reliability, which would have recognised the attributes of generation sources able to store fuel on site. FERC has instead launched a new proceeding to "holistically" examine the resilience of the system.

Brookfield Business Partners, together with institutional partners - collectively known as Brookfield - has agreed to acquire 100% of Westinghouse Electric Company from Toshiba Corporation for total of about $4.6 billion, the companies announced today.

Dominion Energy and Scana Corporation have today announced an agreement for them to combine in a stock-for-stock merger. They said the agreement calls for "significant benefits" to Scana's South Carolina Electric & Gas Company subsidiary electricity customers to offset previous and future costs related to the withdrawn VC Summer units 2 and 3 nuclear power plant project.

Scana Corporation announced yesterday that its principal subsidiary, South Carolina Electric & Gas Company, had filed a formal request with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to withdraw the combined operating licences for units 2 and 3 of the VC Summer nuclear power plant.

An anti-nuclear activist in the 1970s was afraid of tyranny. An anti-nuclear activist now is afraid of radiation. But tyranny didn't happen and the effects of radiation are misunderstood. The threat of climate change IS real and, to fight it, we need nuclear power, writes Scott L. Montgomery.

A bill that would recognise the environmental and fuel diversity attributes of New Jersey's nuclear power plants has been approved by House and Senate utility committees and will now go forward to the full legislative body.

The US National Nuclear Security Administration  has submitted to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission a preliminary report on a new uranium fuel that will enable the conversion of six US research reactors from highly enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium.

UPDATED: The Georgia Public Service Commission has today unanimously approved Georgia Power's recommendation to complete Vogtle units 3 and 4. The project's owners have agreed to new penalties for delays and cost increases stipulated by the PSC.

A report prepared for Connecticut's Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and its Public Utilities Regulatory Authority has found that Dominion Energy's Millstone nuclear power plant is likely to operate profitably from the early 2020s to the mid-2030s, even under harsh market and operating cost assumptions.