Germany's Federal Company for Radioactive Waste Disposal has awarded a contract for planning the design and licensing of a waste treatment plant and an interim storage facility at the former Asse II salt mine in the district of Wolfenbüttel, Lower Saxony. The winning consortium has until the end of 2023 to submit the plans.

Canada's Nuclear Waste Management Organisation has released two planning documents that address the wide range of priorities, questions and concerns heard to date from Canadians and Indigenous peoples about the transportation of used nuclear fuel.

Finnish radioactive waste management company Posiva Oy has submitted its application for an operating licence for the used fuel encapsulation plant and final disposal facility currently under construction at Olkiluoto. The repository - the first in the world for used fuel - is expected to begin operations in the mid-2020s.

The first equipment has arrived at a deconversion plant being built by Russia's Rosatom and France's Orano in eastern Siberia. The plant is part of a long-term project to manage and make use of depleted uranium stocks in Russia.

Deep borehole disposal is a viable, cost-effective solution for all of the intermediate and high-level long-lived radioactive waste that is being temporarily stored by five European countries, according to a feasibility study by Deep Isolation. The study was commissioned by Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning on behalf of the European Repository Development Organisation, a multinational group established in 2021 to address the challenges of safely managing long-lived radioactive wastes either separately or in one combined mined repository.

The second of two community partnerships has been formed in Copeland, Cumbria, UK, to take forward discussions around siting a geological disposal facility for high-level radioactive waste. Following the formation of the Mid Copeland GDF Community Partnership last month, neighbouring South Copeland has now put itself forward as a possible host for the facility.

A cleaning technique from the oil and gas industry is being used to decontaminate old pipeline sections from the UK's Harwell research site, saving money and allowing them to be recycled instead of disposed of as radioactive waste.

Work to prepare all foreign-owned high-level waste for return to overseas customers has been completed, the UK's Sellafield Ltd has announced. A total of 1840 containers have been prepared for return to overseas customers since 2008, as part of the closing out of commercial reprocessing contracts from the Thorp reprocessing plant.

The US Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management is marking thirty years of cleanup work at the Idaho National Laboratory site to ensure the protection and safety of the underlying Snake River Plain aquifer in compliance with state and federal regulations.

The Swedish government has stated that it intends to announce a decision on the expansion of the existing SFR repository for low and intermediate-level waste at Forsmark on 22 December. In a press conference today, Minister of Climate and Environment Annika Strandhäll said a decision on the application for a final repository for used nuclear fuel also at Forsmark will be announced on 27 January.

A pilot study by Sweden's Studsvik AB shows that all of Norway's metallic uranium research reactor fuel could be processed using its oxidation process in less than two years. Several studies have already recommended chemical treatment of the fuel before it is disposed of in an underground repository.

France's EDF and water, waste and energy management company Veolia will early next year create a joint venture - to be known as Waste2Glass - to develop Veolia's GeoMelt vitrification technology. The partners hope to extend the application of the technology beyond high-level radioactive waste.