The US Department of Commerce has set out 24 goals to safeguard US access to mineral commodities designated as critical to the nation's economic security. Uranium is one of the minerals on the critical list.

NAC International Inc has announced it will supply its ultra-high capacity Magnastor systems for transportable dry used fuel storage at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant under a project award from Exelon Generation. The contract is the seventh for the Magnastor system.

Entergy’s Pilgrim nuclear power plant in Massachusetts was shut down permanently on 31 May after 47 years in operation. The company, which is leaving the merchant power business, announced in 2015 that it would close the 680 MWe boiling water reactor early for economic reasons.

Owners and operators of US civilian nuclear power reactors purchased a total of 40 million pounds U3O8 equivalent (15,386 tU) of deliveries during 2018, according to the latest uranium marketing report from the US Energy Information Administration. Nearly 10% of that was US-origin uranium.
 

US utility Duke Energy has announced plans to decommission the single-unit Crystal River nuclear power plant in Florida by 2027. Decommissioning of the plant, which was permanently shut down in 2013, had originally been expected to take an additional 50 years to complete.

Framatome has received a voucher through the US Department of Energy's Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear programme to support development of Lightbridge Fuel in collaboration with Idaho National Laboratory.

UPDATED: Draft legislation that would recognise the clean air attributes of Ohio's nuclear power plants has been passed by the state's House and will now go to forward to the Senate.

The US Department of Energy has selected three projects in three states in its latest quarterly application review to receive funding for cost-shared research and development for advanced nuclear technologies. The three projects will receive a total of almost USD10.6 million.

Work has begun to demolish the last two buildings that once supported the gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment process at Oak Ridge in Tennessee. Buildings K-131 and K-631 are the most contaminated structures remaining on the 2,200-acre (890 hectare) site.

Fuel transfer operations at the shut down San Onofre nuclear power plant in California can resume following approval by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Such operations were suspended following an incident last August during the lowering of a used fuel canister into a storage vault.

Utility Xcel Energy has announced plans for its last two remaining coal-fired power plants in the Upper Midwest region of the USA to retire 10 years earlier than previously planned while operation of its Monticello nuclear power plant will be extended by at least a decade.

The US Department of Energy should learn from the legacy of the NASA commercial orbital transportation services programme to return the USA to a leadership role in nuclear energy, the Nuclear Innovation Alliance says in a report issued today.