Silex Systems Limited and Cameco Corporation have executed an agreement to jointly purchase GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy's 76% interest in GE-Hitachi Global Laser Enrichment LLC for a total of USD20 million. The purchase will be conditional amongst other things on an existing agreement to purchase depleted uranium tails from the US Department of Energy remaining in place. GLE is the exclusive licensee for SILEX laser uranium enrichment technology.
 

General Fusion has secured financing to launch a programme to design, construct and operate a prototype fusion demonstration plant, the Canadian company said yesterday.

Isotek Systems, TerraPower and the US Department of Energy have signed a public-private partnership agreement to use material recovered from a legacy uranium-233 inventory to increase the supply of the medical radioisotope actinium-225.

Framatome earlier this year applied its ultra-high pressure cavitation peening process on reactor vessel primary nozzles at Dominion Energy's Millstone nuclear power plant in Waterford, Connecticut. This marked the first underwater application of this maintenance technique on reactor pressure vessel nozzles to primary pipe welds.

Deep Isolation and NAC International are to cooperate in the design, development and manufacture of Deep Isolation's disposal canister technology.

The UK Space Agency and Nuclear Decommissioning Agency have issued a challenge to smaller businesses and university start-ups to research and develop satellite-enabled technologies that could help support the country's nuclear decommissioning efforts.

Two Canadian research organisations have completed the first joint production run of actinium-225 (Ac-225), one of the rarest medical radioisotopes in the world. The high-purity isotope was produced using a high-energy cyclotron at the TRIUMF particle accelerator centre in Vancouver and processed at Canadian Nuclear Laboratories' (CNL) Chalk River laboratories in Ontario.

Laker TRF Ltd says its water detritiation technology could provide "cost-effective and reliable" detritiation for light water applications, such as contaminated water at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, and fusion power reactors, such as ITER.

The UK's National Nuclear Laboratory announced today that Rawwater Engineering Company, whose specialist alloy seals for the oil and gas sector are being adapted to support Sellafield decommissioning challenges, has signed a contract that will take the company into the Japanese nuclear sector.

Lightbridge Corporation and Enfission, LLC have demonstrated the manufacturing process and fabrication of Lightbridge Fuel surrogate rods in a length that could be usable in NuScale Power's small modular reactors.

A project to demonstrate the production of hydrogen in integrated energy systems at US nuclear power plants is one of three selected by the US Department of Energy to receive a share of USD15 million in its latest announcement of project selectees. At the same time, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has awarded USD15 million in grants to support the development of the country's future nuclear workforce.

Lead test assemblies of Westinghouse EnCore fuel rods containing uranium silicide fuel pellets have been loaded into a commercial nuclear power plant for the first time. The fuels, developed through the US Department of Energy's accident tolerant fuels programme, were loaded into Exelon's Byron unit 2 during a scheduled refuelling outage.