Investigations into potential cracks in boiler spines at two units at each of the Heysham I and Hartlepool sites are likely to take until the end of the year to complete, EDF Energy has announced.

Cavendish Fluor Partnership has been formally awarded the contract by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority to manage 12 UK nuclear sites and their respective decommissioning programs.

The final shipment of used fuel from the UK's Sizewell A nuclear power plant has been sent for reprocessing at Sellafield, marking the end of a five-year operation to remove all fuel from the site.

The third stage of the generic design assessment (GDA) for the Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR) is to begin in September after regulators completed their initial high-level assessment of the Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy reactor design without identifying any fundamental issues to prevent it from being built in the UK.

The UK's Office for Nuclear Regulation has said it is satisfied that EDF Energy is taking "appropriate and conservative action in the interests of continued nuclear safety" in its decision to shut down its reactors at the Heysham 1 and Hartlepool sites in response to the identification of unexpected "cracking" in a boiler spine of unit 1 at Heysham 1.

EDF Energy says it has shut down four of its UK reactors after discovering a fault in a "boiler spine" in unit 1 of its Heysham 1 nuclear power plant - "although routine inspections of other boiler spines have not previously indicated any similar defects."

A new centre for developing technologies for remote handling in extreme conditions has opened at the Culham Science Centre in the UK. A £15.6 million ($26.2 million) purpose-built facility is to be constructed at the site by 2016.

Operations have ended at a post-irradiation examination facility at the UK's Harwell nuclear research site. Decommissioning activities will begin in about three years.

Thales Group has secured a ten-year, £30 million ($51 million) contract to provide long-term support for computerised control systems at seven of EDF Energy's UK nuclear power plants.

The UK government has published its framework policy for the long-term management of higher activity radioactive waste, including details of how it intends to work with interested communities to site a geological disposal facility.

Spanish utility Iberdrola will work with GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy to develop a proposal to build a Prism integral fast reactor in the UK, but is yet to decide the scope of its involvement either as an engineer or operator of the potential plant.

Man has been sifting through trash for millennia, but the extraction of americium-241 waste from the UK's stockpile of civilian plutonium takes the exercise to a whole new dimension. Am-241 - a decay product of plutonium-241 - is the most prevalent isotope of americium in long-term stored plutonium and is currently considered to be waste.