Two Swiss expert groups have today released reports supporting the repository siting proposals put forward by the country's national radioactive waste disposal cooperative Nagra. However, they call for further investigations to be carried out in the Nördlich Lägern region.

Swiss utility BKW has initiated the process for decommissioning the Mühleberg nuclear power plant by submitting an application to the government. The plant is due to shut down by the end of 2019.

The Swiss nuclear safety regulator has reaffirmed the measures that must be taken by utility BKW in order for its Mühleberg nuclear power plant to continue operating until 2019.

Swiss utility Axpo has submitted a road map to the country's nuclear regulator for further investigations of flaw indications in the reactor pressure vessel of unit 1 of the Beznau plant. The company does not now expect the unit to restart until at least August 2016.

Switzerland's Council of States has agreed to avoid putting legal limits on the operating lives of the country's nuclear power reactors. It has also rejected a proposal that was supported by the Federal Nuclear Safety Inspectorate (ENSI), of requiring operators to submit a long-term operating concept every 10 years once a reactor reaches 40 years of service.

Several international cooperation agreements related to nuclear safety and regulation have been signed this week on the sidelines of the International Atomic Energy Agency's General Conference in Vienna.

The return of US-origin highly-enriched uranium (HEU) from the University of Basel to the USA marks the removal of all HEU in the country.

The restart of unit 1 of Switzerland's Beznau nuclear power plant, currently offline for an annual overhaul, has been postponed while flaw indications detected in its reactor pressure vessel (RPV) are investigated further. A maintenance outage at unit 2 has been brought forward so that its RPV can also be checked.

A test container that has been stored in a tunnel at the Grimsel underground laboratory in Switzerland for 18 years is being removed as the experiment is dismantled. The full-scale experiment set out to determine the effects of heat from high-level waste on the surrounding rock and backfill material.

Westinghouse has been awarded a long-term contract for reactor pressure vessel nozzle inspections at the Leibstadt nuclear power plant in Switzerland. The company has already been performing such inspections at Leibstadt over the past ten years.

Switzerland's government has adopted a total revision of the federal ordinance on civil nuclear liability. The ordinance governs the enforcement of the country's new civil nuclear liability law, which was passed by parliament in 2008 but has yet to come into force.

The underground tunnel in which the Full-scale Emplacement Experiment will be carried out at the Mont Terri Rock Laboratory in Switzerland has been sealed and monitoring has begun. The experiment aims to simulate the conditions within a repository containing high-level radioactive waste.