Happy Friday, and happy early Halloween, nuke-watchers. Before we head off into the weekend (and before your rad waste reporter dives into the latest Call of Duty installment), here are some other stories RadWaste Monitor was tracking from across the civilian nuclear power space this week.
The Department of Energy’s nuclear power chief joined the agency’s head in stumping for the existing U.S. reactor fleet during an international conference this week.
“Every premature shutdown of a nuclear reactor is a step backwards,” said Kathryn Huff, DOE’s assistant secretary for nuclear power, during a Thursday panel discussion at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s annual Ministerial Conference, held in Washington. “We can only win this race against the climate if we’re walking forwards, not backwards.”
Energy secretary Jennifer Granholm expressed a similar sentiment during her own remarks Wednesday, saying that DOE is “committed to maintaining and modernizing our existing fleet.” Two nuclear power plants have gone offline in the U.S. in recent months — Michigan’s Palisades Nuclear Generating Station and Indian Point Energy Center in New York.
Engineers at Ukraine’s embattled Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant have been trying to keep the facility connected to external power following several outages in recent weeks, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said this week.
The situation at Zaporizhzhya, which has been under Russian control since the early weeks of Moscow’s February invasion of Ukraine, remains “precarious,” the IAEA said in a statement Thursday. However, the plant has over the last week or so “received the power it needs for reactor cooling and other essential safety and security functions directly and without interruption from the national grid,” the agency said.
Zaporizhzhya’s connection to external power, which it needs for some plant operations such as cooling its six reactors, has been severed several times over the last few weeks thanks to fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces. The plant has emergency diesel generators that can provide necessary power in the event of an outage.
The Department of Energy and the Joe Biden administration this week announced a $150 million in funding to support nuclear energy research and development at Idaho National Laboratory (INL), according to a press release from the agency.
The $150 million grant, paid for under the Inflation Reduction Act passed in August, is aimed at supporting nuclear research infrastructure for “nearly a dozen” projects at the Idaho Falls, Idaho, national lab, DOE said in the Thursday press release. Among other things, the funding will “accelerate the replacement of aging plant infrastructure systems” at INL’s Advanced Test Reactor and Materials Fuels Complex, the release said.
“More than 300 commercial reactors operating around the world today can trace their roots back to Idaho National Laboratory, and these infrastructure investments allow America to continue leading the world in groundbreaking nuclear energy research and development,” energy secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement Thursday. “Thanks to President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, DOE is taking critical steps to strengthen domestic nuclear development and deployment—helping ensure the United States is on track to reach a clean energy future.”
