The House Appropriations Committee was scheduled to mark up a 2025 spending bill on Tuesday that would keep the budget for DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy about flat at $1.8 billion and preserve unrequested funding for the office’s advanced nuclear reactor programs.
The markup of the 2025 Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act was to take place at 9:00 a.m. Eastern in Washington and stream online from the committee’s website. The bill is one of three the committee will vote on during the marathon session.
The United Kingdom’s Department for Energy Security & Net Zero this week solicited bids for a cost-sharing grant worth £70 million, or just under $90 million, to create design and construction plans for facilities that will contribute to cleanup waste products from domestic enrichment of high assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU).
The grant from the U.K. government would make up 70% of the total funding for the program, with bidders putting up the other 30%, according to a notice published online July 1. The winner will create plans for an oxide HALEU deconversion facility: essentially, a plant to stabilize leftovers from HALEU enrichment, which the U.K. is funding under a separate contract with Urenco, the state-owned European enrichment consortium.
A California non-profit dedicated to raising awareness about spent nuclear fuel stored at the shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generating planned to hold a one-day symposium on July 28 at the University of California, San Diego, to discuss what the organizers called the “under-recognized yet growing dangers from radioactive waste building up at nuclear power plants and the nuclear weapons complex across the United States, and what can be done now to reduce those threats.”
The nonprofit, the Samuel Lawrence Foundation, invited members of the public to attend, and to register online prior to the event.
Among the scheduled speakers are officials with local, state and federal governments, members of anti-nuclear non-profit groups and academics, according to the event’s agenda.
In June, the Washington state Department of Ecology published its 85-page response to public comments about the Department of Energy’s plans to solidify 2,000 gallons of low-level radioactive waste at the Hanford Site in a concrete-like grout.
The state’s public response to the comments checks one of the last boxes prior to issuance of the one-year Demonstration Draft Research, Development, and Demonstration Permit. The permit could take effect July 18, according to Ecology’s comment page.
The pretreated waste will be stored in six U.S. Department of Transportation shipping containers. The containers will then be shipped off-site for grouting and disposal at sites such as EnergySolutions in Clive, Utah and Waste Control Specialists in Andrews County, Texas.
