The United Kingdom’s Nuclear Waste Services identified South Holderness, in the county of East Riding of Yorkshire in east-central England between the Humber River and North Sea coast, as a candidate host community for a deep geologic disposal facility for nuclear waste.
The government-owned company this week announced the formation of a Geological Disposal Facility Working Group in South Holderness, writing that the group’s formation “is in no way an indication” that the area will host a repository. Like the U.S., the U.K. plans to follow a consent-based siting process to locate both a willing host community and a geologically suitable area.
The Idaho National Laboratory in December took a shipment of 25 experimental irradiated uranium fuel rods that could help nuclear power plants operate longer, the lab said Thursday in a press release.
The spent rods, made by Westinghouse Electric Co., and irradiated in a commercial reactor, are designed to push the time a nuclear plant can operate before shutting down to refuel to two years from one-and-a-half years, the lab said. In Idaho, the irradiated rods will be dissected and subject to stress tests to help determine if they are commercially viable.
The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee is working with a company called Zeno Power to utilize decaying nuclear components in radioisotope power systems capable of generating non-polluting energy for agencies such as NASA and the Department of Defense.
Zeno Power and DOE contractor United Cleanup Oak Ridge recently shipped a radioisotope thermoelectric generator containing strontium-90 away from the nuclear cleanup site to recycle the material into a sort of nuclear battery suitable for space exploration and military applications, according to a press release.
