Here’s this week’s collection of quick-hit news about, and with implications for, U.S. nuclear security.
The National Nuclear Security Administration and Canada’s Atomic Energy of Canada Limited have signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on nuclear safety and security, the government entities announced jointly.
Brent Park, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation, signed the virtual memo with a pair of executives from the Canadian federal Crown corporation: Richard Sexton, president and CEO, and Shannon Quinn, vice president for science, technology, and commercial oversight.
Read more from the NNSA and the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited.
The secretary of energy and Poland’s secretary of state for strategic energy infrastructure signed an intergovernmental agreement to cooperate on a civilian nuclear power program for the eastern European NATO ally.
“The Agreement provides that over the next 18 months, the United States and Poland will work together on a report delivering a design for implementing Poland’s nuclear power program, as well as potential financing arrangements,” according to a Department of Energy press release.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico announced a partnership with SambaNova Systems, Palo Alto, Calif., to collaborate on artificial intelligence programs for nuclear stockpile stewardship.
“The cornerstone of this partnership agreement is the acquisition of multiple SambaNova DataScale systems, deployed at each of the aforementioned [National Nuclear Security Administration] Laboratory facilities,” the NNSA wrote in a press release.
An inertial confinement fusion problem will be among the first use cases for the new systems, the NNSA said.
A five-year project that wrapped up in July at the Savannah River Site’s Tritium Extraction Facility means more efficient processing of waste gas from nuclear-weapons work, the Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions said this week.
The Tritium Extraction Facility “now has more freedom to stack its own process waste gas without having to coordinate inter-building transfers with the H Area New Manufacturing (HANM) facility,” Joey Huckabee, the Tritium Extraction Facility Manager said in a press release.
The tritium extraction facility harvests radioactive tritium for nuclear-weapon reservoirs from rods irradiated at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Unit I nuclear reactor. WesDyne makes the lithium rods irradiated in the reactors.
