Paul Murray this week had his first official day as the the Department of Energy’s deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition.
Murray was internally announced as the full-time head of the agency’s civilian nuclear waste programs on Sept. 28. On Oct. 8, DOE added his name to the Nuclear Energy office’s organization chart.
An emergency diesel generator failed at the Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Power Station in South Carolina, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote in a letter dated Oct. 4 to Eric Carr, president of nuclear operations at reactor owner Dominion Energy.
NRC charged Dominion with an apparent violation after inspections in August and September, when it became clear the company had not changed maintenance practices known to be bad for the generator’s fuel-oil piping. The generator failed on Nov. 2, 2022. NRC had determined, based on Dominion’s own reports, that the cause was over-tightening connections on the piping.
Canada’s minister of energy and natural resources endorsed a strategy for radioactive waste put together by the government-chartered Nuclear Waste Management Organization, according to a press release last week.
The strategy essentially calls for disposal of low-level waste in near-surface facilities and for construction of a deep geologic repository to store intermediate and non-fuel high-level waste. These plans are separate from the country’s initiative to build a deep geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel, the ministry said.
Local officials from the Township of Ignace, a potential host community for a future Canadian deep geologic repository, were scheduled to travel to Finland to speak with nuclear waste experts and tour the Onkalo geologic repository that Posiva is building near the Swedish border, the local Northwest Ontario News Watch reported this week.
The Canadain Chronicle Journal reported that Canada’s Nuclear Waste Organization, responsible for locating a site for the repository, will fund the trip.
The North Carolina legislature declared nuclear power a clean source of energy, the local Winston-Salem Journal newspaper reported this week.
The legislature, controlled by Republicans, had to override a veto by Gov. Roy Cooper (D) to get the job done. Few Democrats in the legislature supported the veto override, the Journal reported.
Centrus Energy Corp. started enriching energy dense uranium fuel using a new centrifuge cascade at the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio, the company said Wednesday.
Centrus, Bethesda, Md., marked the milestone with a tour of the event that included Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk. The company thinks it will begin retrieving low enriched high assay uranium, or HALEU, from its Piketon centrifuges “this month,” according to a press release.
Centrus is making the HALEU for DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy under the second of two contracts the office has cut with the company to produce the fuel, which is 19.75% uranium-235 by mass. The first phase of the current contract’s two-year base period calls for Centrus to produce 20 kilograms of HALEU for DOE’s inspection by Dec. 31. If DOE approves the sample, Centrus would be on the hook to produce 900 kilograms by December 2024 in the base period’s second phase.
