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.

The US Department of Energy has announced a plan to provide USD10 million over three years to advance particle accelerator technology for medical, security, energy, and industrial applications, with a focus on the development of novel "compact" accelerator technologies for cancer treatment and other uses.

GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy and TerraPower are to collaborate on pursuing a public private partnership to design and construct the Versatile Test Reactor for the US Department of Energy. Utility Energy Northwest will support the joint GEH-TerraPower effort, with other parties said to be interested in joining.

France's Framatome has been awarded a contract by the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) to support research that will inform the development of new materials to be used in the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider, a major upgrade to the existing Large Hadron Collider.

Global Nuclear Fuel accident-tolerant fuel assemblies have been loaded into a US reactor for the first time. Lead test assemblies using the company's ARMOR-coated zirconium cladding and IronClad accident-tolerant fuel solutions have been installed at Exelon's Clinton boiling water reactor power plant in Illinois.

A nuclear technique has successfully reduced the tsetse fly population in Senegal without harming other insects, an eight-year study has found. The study was supported by the International Atomic Energy Agency, together with the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation. The sterile insect technique (SIT) is an insect birth control method that uses radiation to sterilise male flies.

The US Department of Energy has selected Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, as the site for a new research facility that it says will be a game-changing resource for the international nuclear physics community. The Electron Ion Collider will be designed and constructed over 10 years and cost about USD1.6-2.6 billion.

Germany's phase-out of nuclear power and increased use instead of fossil fuels could have led to 1100 additional deaths each year from air pollution, according to a study by economists at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of California at Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon University.

A ceremony was held on 15 December at the Xiangshan uranium deposit near Fuzhou city in China's Jiangxi province to mark the start of the country's deepest drilling project related to the exploration of uranium resources. China National Nuclear Corporation said a 3000-metre-deep bore hole will be drilled.

Kairos Power, Moltex Canada, Terrestrial Energy Inc and UltraSafe Nuclear Corporation have been selected as the first recipients of support under an initiative launched earlier this year to accelerate the deployment of small modular reactors in Canada, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories has announced.