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Areva executives recently signed a letter of intent with China National Nuclear Corp. to build a nuclear fuel recycling facility in China. Terms of the deal and the potential location for the plant were not announced, but an Areva release said the agreement covers technical specifications, project organization...

Legislation proposed in the Senate Thursday would enact many of the policies outlined by the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, setting the stage for interim spent nuclear fuel storage sites. Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Lisa...

A graduate student at Oregon State University recently patented a concept for using gamma rays from spent nuclear fuel to sterilize medical equipment and other products. Marketed as G-Demption, the technology would place fuel assemblies or portions of them into a container engineered to isolate their...

A power outage disabled cooling systems for four spent fuel pools at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan Monday. Tokyo Electric Power Co. reported the problems Monday evening at the plant severely damaged following the 2011 tsunami. Quoting Japanese regulators, the Japan Times reported the outage...

(Please visit the site to view this video) A closed fuel cycle that uses existing recycling technology for nuclear fuel could provide thousands of years worth of power using only the uranium mined to date. To that end, scientists at Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicago are refining a technique...

Russia's state-owned power reactor company Rosatom is taking bids for an experimental $166 million plant to recycle fuel from its VVER-1000 reactors. The pilot plant will be built at Rosatom's Federal State Unitary Enterprise Mining and Chemical Plant in Zheleznogorsk, about 150 miles southwest...

Transnuclear has won a key regulatory approval for its new waste cask that will allow larger shipments and can accommodate fuel from Areva's EPR plant design. The TN Long Cask received a certificate of compliance from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Transnuclear announced this week. Operational...

Nuclear regulators proposed new rules that would require backup control rooms at Japanese nuclear plants in response to the Fukushima Daiichi accidents, while the country's industry minister recently reiterated the government's commitment to spent fuel reprocessing. Recent developments in Japan...

A group of utilities has formally ended its pursuit of a spent fuel storage site on tribal land near Salt Lake City, Utah. The Salt Lake Tribune reported Dec. 21 that Private Fuel Storage has asked the NRC to withdraw a license for the facility on land leased from the Skull Valley Goshute tribe. The...

The Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank that promotes conservative causes, recently uploaded this video to YouTube that argues America's approach to nuclear waste should be more like that of France. After a brief history of spent-fuel policies in the U.S., it includes an overview of Areva's...

In the mid-1990s, Idaho became the first and only state in the country to reach a binding settlement requiring the federal government to move nuclear waste out of the state by a specific date. But since then, Idaho has also consolidated its position as home to the country's premiere research center...

The Department of Energy has offered a tentative sign that it may be interested in consolidated spent-fuel storage projects in the future. The Augusta Chronicle noted that DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy posted a notice last week to identify potential private-sector resources for a large-scale spent...

Faced with constraints on its crane inside the unit, Entergy has engineered a multi-step process that began Sunday for removing spent fuel from Indian Point 3 to dry casks. It will be the first fuel to be moved from the reactor's spent fuel pool to dry cask storage since the 1,025 megawatt Westinghouse...

A court ruling Friday will force the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reevaluate the environmental impact of storing spent fuel at nuclear plants around the country in the absence of a waste repository at Yucca Mountain or one like it. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals challenged 2010 agency rule...

Areva subsidiary Transnuclear on Wendesday announced it has submitted a new storage system for spent nuclear fuel to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for review. Known as NUHOMS 32PTH2, it is designed for marine environments, according to an Areva release, incorporating more robust corrosion resistance...

A much-anticipated report on the future of nuclear waste disposal in the United States was made public Thursday. It offered a broad outline of how the country might approach the disposal of 67,500 tons of spent fuel in light of the government’s failure to construct a repository for it in Nevada’s...

A wispy white substance has been discovered clinging to submerged racks of spent fuel assemblies stored at the Savannah River Site. On Friday the Augusta Chronicle noted a report to federal regulators describing a white, stringy material on the racks at the national lab's L Area. Scientists collected...

Spent fuel pools are undergoing desalination and the Japanese government has demanded an updated decommissioning schedule for the severely damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Developments over the last week at the Tokyo Electric Power Co. reactors include: Government Demands Revised “Roadmap”...

An Areva executive said Monday that the company is in discussions with utilities to propose a spent-fuel recycling plant in the U.S.. Jacques Besnainou, CEO of the company's U.S. subsidiary, told reporters in Washington that Areva hopes to have a plant in the planning stage by 2015. Bloomberg and...

With the station blackout at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant providing a stark illustration of the risks inherent to storing spent fuel at reactors, an MIT study released Tuesday argues the United States needs to build centralized repositories for its nuclear waste. “The Future of...

Work at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant to restore electricity and refill spent fuel tanks wore on Monday, with workers briefly evacuated while smoke or steam was observed above two reactors. A team of water trucks continued to spray water on reactors 3 and 4. The amount sprayed in unit 3 in recent...

UPDATED 6:20 P.M. – The Tokyo Electric Power Company has confirmed that a kilometer-long AC power line has been connected to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, a positive development following a weeklong station blackout and multiple reactor emergencies. In the coming hours, engineers will...

UPDATED 11:44 a.m. -- A Japanese TV station has obtained this video of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant taken from a nearby helicopter: (Please visit the site to view this video) ------------- Japanese defense forces enlisted lead-shielded helicopters to drop water into the damaged...

Areva will shuffle the CEOs at three of its subsidiaries, the French energy group announced Wednesday, with Transnuclear Inc. chief operating officer Bob Grubb stepping in as acting president and CEO at that company starting March 1. Grubb holds a master's in science in civil engineering...

- Edited By Tom Lamar - As a national panel studies permanent solutions to nuclear waste disposal, the operators of Plant Vogtle are planning new facilities that could store waste safely in Burke County for more than a century. "Our plans are actually to build two new storage facilities: a...