There are lots of new workers joining the nuclear industry these days, but Baltimore-based Constellation Energy has perhaps the only one to list “former Miss America” on her resume.
Constellation announced in a Monday press release it hired former Miss America Grace Stanke as a full-time employee working as both an engineer and a spokesperson for nuclear energy.
During Stanke’s 2023 reign as Miss America, the recent University of Wisconsin-Madison nuclear engineering graduate often touted nuclear’s role as a carbon-free energy source. Stanke also was a co-op, something akin to an intern, with Constellation between 2020 and 2022. In addition to speaking engagements and media interviews, Stanke’s new Constellation role will include part of a group responsible for designing reactor fuel placement and core design for the company’s 21 nuclear reactors, the company said.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico sent 11 shipments of transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant between October and March, the lab’s cleanup contractor said recently.
The shipments totaled a little more than 32.5 cubic meters in volume, according to a second-fiscal-quarter update posted on the website of Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos (N3B).
There were five shipments in the first quarter of fiscal year 2024 and six in the second. At the halfway mark on the government fiscal calendar, that put the agency behind last year’s average pace of more than 14 shipments quarterly, according to the N3B fact sheet.
Meanwhile, the contractor did not say how many of the milestones it met under the Department of Energy’s 2016 consent order with New Mexico, which sets the rules for cleanup of legacy nuclear waste at Los Alamos. The state and the federal government are renegotiating the terms of that consent order and think they can reach an accord as soon as May, according to a court filing from early April.
The National Nuclear Security Administration has completed a $50-million refurbishment of the electric transmission system at the Nevada Nuclear Security Site, the agency said last week.
Completed in mid-March the 138-kilovolt Power Transmission System Replacement Project modernizes the site’s electrical infrastructure that was built in 1963, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said in an April 18 press release.
Quanta Infrastructure Solutions Group was the contractor in charge of replacing the aging infrastructure, said an NNSA spokesperson by email Thursday. The project included replacing 26 miles of power lines and old wooden poles, according to the release. The project also curbs the risk of losing critical stockpile stewardship data from experiments, NNSA said.
The Department of Energy contractor running the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina is looking for expressions of interest from Minority Serving Institutions for nuclear cleanup research and development.
Battelle Savannah River Alliance published the expressions of interest notice Monday in the System for Award Management. The joint venture between Battelle and several regional universities is looking to collaborate with colleges with significant minority populations to identify research projects for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management.
The research projects proposed should relate to some of Environmental Management’s priority issues, such as managing radioactive tank waste, protecting groundwater or tearing down contaminated structures. Responses are due by 5 p.m. Eastern Time on May 3.
David Sholl, the interim executive director of University of Tennessee-Oak Ridge Innovation Institute since June 2023, was appointed this month as the permanent leader of the center at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Sholl is also vice provost of University of Tennessee, Knoxville, according to the April 11 press release. Since becoming the interim boss, Sholl accelerated plans to attract 100 or more new university-laboratory joint research faculty and 500 research graduate students by 2030, according to the press release.
The University of Tennessee-Oak Ridge Innovation Institute uses the strengths of the two institutions to increase research collaboration and graduate education, Oak Ridge National laboratory said in the press release. Sholl joined the lab years ago to lead a decarbonization initiative. He served 15 years as a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology.
