KEPCO Nuclear Fuel has announced the commissioning of a nuclear fuel assembly characterisation test facility. The South Korean company has previously relied on overseas organisations to verify its fuel assembly designs.

Three recent announcements will help secure future supplies of vital medical radioisotopes. Westinghouse Electric Company and Nordion (Canada) Inc are to work together on technology to produce cobalt-60 in pressurised water reactors; Framatome and Kinectrics have launched a new joint venture to produce lutetium-177 in partnership with Bruce Power; and BWXT Technologies' proprietary technetium-99m generators have passed a testing milestone.

Canadian Nuclear Laboratories has agreed to collaborate with USNC-Power, a subsidiary of Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC), on research in support of USNC's Micro Modular Reactor. The project will also include preliminary activities to explore the feasibility of siting a manufacturing facility for USNC's fuel at CNL's Chalk River campus.
 

Lead test assemblies of accident-tolerant fuel installed in unit 1 of Southern Nuclear's Edwin I Hatch nuclear power plant in early 2018 have completed a 24-month fuel cycle. A sample of the lead test rods will now undergo testing.

Framatome has officially opened a new engineering research and operations centre at Cadarache in south-eastern France. It has also announced an expansion of its Intercontrôle automated non-destructive testing subsidiary, which is based at the same site.

VTT Technical Research Centre in Finland has today announced the launch of a project to develop a small modular reactor for district heating. Most of the country's district heating is currently produced by burning coal, natural gas, wood fuels and peat, but it aims to phase out its use of coal in energy production by 2029.

Framatome and General Atomics are to collaborate on the development of accident-tolerant fuel channels fabricated from a silicon carbide composite rather than the current zirconium alloys. Advanced nuclear fuel designs using silicon carbide in the fuel channel, the say, will enhance safety and fuel performance.

The US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Tennessee Valley Authority are to collaborate on the economic feasibility of potentially licensing, building, operating and maintaining one or more advanced nuclear reactors - such as a small modular reactor - at TVA's Clinch River site near Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Idaho National Laboratory is to provide Oklo Inc with access to recovered material from used nuclear fuel to develop and demonstrate the Oklo Aurora - a micro-reactor that can be used in remote or off-grid locations to generate power. Jacob DeWitte, Oklo co-founder and CEO, said the award paves the way for an important demonstration of the first Aurora plant, as well as the "ability of advanced reactors to convert used nuclear fuel, that would otherwise be treated for disposal, into clean energy".

The US Department of Energy on 5 February issued a Request for Information/Notice of Intent to solicit applications for two advanced reactor demonstration awards. It said the issuance of the RFI/NOI was also to give interested parties an opportunity "to provide their insights on how the demonstration programme could be successfully executed".

South African utility Eskom yesterday published a request for an Expression of Interest in reviving all or parts of the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor project. It is seeking investors to take stakes in PBMR Ltd, the development and deployment of the reactor design, and in TRISO fuel manufacturing.

Engineers at the UK's University of Sheffield have developed materials that they say could be used to help decommission the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power plants. In the new research published today, they report their development of small batches of low radioactivity materials that can be used to simulate lava-like fuel containing materials. LFCMs are a mixture of highly radioactive molten nuclear fuel and building materials that fuse together during a nuclear meltdown.