Part 1 of 2 Parts

Campbell County in Wyoming is one of the nation’s most energy-prolific counties. It is home to uranium mining, oil, natural gas and the most productive coal-mining district in North America. Campbell County officials are cautiously supportive of the nuclear energy industry’s burgeoning interest in northeast Wyoming.

The Campbell County Board of Commissioners passed a resolution Tuesday stating the body will not support storing nuclear waste locally in their county. This resolution is aligned with state law, which currently prohibits nuclear waste storage. In anticipation of the possibility that that could change, the Campbell County resolution urges state lawmakers to allow “citizens to vote on the matter of high-level nuclear waste storage.”

The five-member commission voted four to one in favor of the position, with Commissioner Jim Ford casting the single “no” vote. The county solicited public input on the issue for several weeks and redrafted the resolution multiple times, most recently during a November 13 workshop. Commissioner Jerry Means said he proposed the resolution because of growing interest in Wyoming from nuclear energy companies, as well as often intense public debate about nuclear energy’s risks and benefits.

Opponents of the resolution, before and after Tuesday’s vote, warned it may send a signal to the nuclear industry, and to BWXT in particular, that it is not welcome in the community. The company’s proposal to build a nuclear fuel manufacturing plant in Campbell County does not involve radioactive waste or storing such materials. However, nuclear energy companies are sensitive to local opposition, according to Gillette-based L&H Industrial President Mike Wandler. He’s often credited for the industry’s recent interest in setting up manufacturing shops in Wyoming.

Wandler recently said, “So any resolutions against nuclear, they’re going to take very seriously. They’re just going to go away and find someplace else to bring those jobs and to bring that revenue.”

Wandler and other nuclear energy industry supporters note that people sometimes confuse BWXT’s plans in Campbell County with a different proposal in Natrona County. Radiant Industries, unlike BWXT, did include the possibility of storing spent nuclear fuel, but the California-based company scrapped its plans to build a nuclear microreactor manufacturing facility in October of this year. The company mentioned a lack of “regulatory certainty” about whether the state would further loosen its ban on nuclear fuel waste storage. That is a key change in law needed to accommodate Radiant’s plan to store spent fuel from its microreactors at a campus outside the town of Bar Nunn.

Wyoming has concerned the prospect of nuclear fuel waste storage for several decades. So far, it has stuck with a ban on storage with one exception. Lawmakers passed House Bill 131, “Nuclear power generation and storage-amendments,” in 2022 to accommodate TerraPower’s Natrium nuclear plant being constructed near Kemmerer. That exception permits nuclear power plants operating in the state to “temporarily” store their own radioactive waste. However, it doesn’t allow waste from nuclear power plants outside the state. Lawmakers have been considering loosening the ban further.

House Bill 16, “Used nuclear fuel storage-amendments,” would have opened Wyoming’s counties to decades of nuclear waste that’s been accumulating at the nation’s nuclear power plants. That legislation was rejected earlier this year along with Senate File 186, “​​Advanced nuclear reactor manufacturers-fuel storage,” which would have accommodated Radiant’s proposal. There was an attempt to revive similar legislation between sessions this year, but it was tabled.

Reached for comment after the resolution was passed, BWXT said it isn’t shying away from Campbell County.

Josh Parker is the BWXT Advanced Nuclear Fuels Senior Director. He said, “The resolution does not impact our proposed plans for a TRISO fuel fabrication facility in Gillette as our facility will neither create nor store high-level nuclear waste or spent nuclear fuel.”

Campbell County

Please read Part 2 next

Over 40% back restart of nuclear plants, poll shows japantimes.com

Nuclear-Capable US Bombers Join Japan Jets To Counter China-Russia Drills | News Roundup tokyoweekender.com

Sturgeon Bay to Continue Receiving Nuclear Energy through New Long-Term Agreement doorcountydailynews.com

Banks Ready To Provide Debt Financing For First Nuclear Power Station, Says Poland nucnet.org

Latitude 47.704656 Longitude -122.318745

Ambient office = 158 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 141 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 146 nanosieverts per hour

New potato from Central Market = 129 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 155 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 137 nanosieverts per hour

Construction work has begun for TRISO-X’s TX-1 advanced nuclear fuel fabrication facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which will be the first plant of its kind in the U.S.

The plant will be the first facility in the U.S. to exclusively manufacture fuel for advanced small modular reactors (SMRs) and will fabricate X-energy’s proprietary tristructural-isotropic (TRISO) fuel for the first proposed deployment of the Xe-100 reactors in partnership with Dow, Inc at Dow’s Seadrift site on the Texas Gulf Coast, and future Xe-100 deployments.

Deployment of the Xe-100 high-temperature gas-cooled modular reactor is receiving support from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DoE) Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP). The program is providing up to fifty percent cost-shared funding for the Xe-100 ARDP, including construction of the TX-1 fuel fabrication facility

In August of this year, TRISO-X announced that it had selected Clark Construction Group for a forty-eight million dollars award, including the completion of the core and shell of the two hundred fourteen thousand eight hundred and twelve square foot facility. At the same time, the company said it had received DoE approval to authorize an additional thirty million dollars for early procurement of critical long-lead equipment and materials to support the successful delivery of subsequent construction phases, and to help keep the project on schedule.

TX-1 is the first of two planned TRISO manufacturing facilities at X-energy’s location in Oak Ridge. It is set to be the first Category II Fuel Fabrication Facility licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in the U.S. with an estimated output of five tons of uranium or Seven hundred thousand TRISO pebbles per year, enough fuel for up to eleven Xe-100 reactors.

Pebbles of TRISO-X fuel recently began thirteen months of irradiation testing at the Idaho National Laboratory to evaluate fuel performance across operating scenarios and qualify them for commercial use.

The NRC groups what it calls special nuclear materials including plutonium, uranium-233, or uranium enriched in the isotopes uranium-233 or uranium-235 and the facilities that possess them into three categories based upon the materials’ potential for use in nuclear weapons or their strategic significance. The NRC’s physical security and safeguards requirements are based on these categories. Category I materials are classed as having high strategic significance, Category II materials are classed as having moderate strategic significance, and Category III materials have the lowest significance.

Currently, three U.S. fuel fabrication plants processing low-enriched uranium have been licensed as Category III facilities by the NRC. Two U.S. fabrication plants are licensed as Category I facilities and can produce nuclear fuel containing high-enriched uranium. They are under government contracts to produce fuel for the US Naval Reactors program as well as low-enriched uranium. The high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) that will be required to fuel many of the SMRs currently under development will need to be fabricated in Category II-licensed facilities. The NRC has received applications for several proposed plants from several different companies.

Joel Duling is the President of TRISO-X. He said, “The start of vertical construction marks another significant milestone in bringing our bold vision for the future of nuclear energy to life. As TX-1 takes shape, it will stand as a symbol of our team’s relentless dedication and determination to bring this transformative project forward in just a few years, not decades.”

TRISO-X

Board of Supes advances talks to remove spent nuclear fuel from San Onofre coastline – NBC 7 San Diego nbcsandiego.com

UT Is Shaping the Next Generation of Nuclear Security Experts news.utk.edu

Advancing back-end pathways for next-generation nuclear systems oecd-nea.org

Five companies selected for HALEU transport funding world-nuclear-news.org

Latitude 47.704656 Longitude -122.318745

Ambient office = 151 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 149 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 139 nanosieverts per hour

Jalapeno pepper from Central Market = 93 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 153 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 143 nanosieverts per hour

The Large Helical Device (LHD) is the world’s largest superconducting plasma confinement device. It utilizes a heliotron magnetic configuration.

Researchers from the National Institute of Fusion Science in Japan developed the LHD for nuclear fusion research. They have successfully tripled the efficiency of a critical diagnostic tool by implementing an innovative “electrostatic lens” technology.

This breakthrough solves a long-standing challenge related to limitations of beam-transport, allowing significantly more precise and detailed measurements of electric potential within high-density plasma.

This enhancement to the Heavy Ion Beam Probe (HIBP) technology has a direct impact on the search for sustainable fusion energy.

The researchers said in a new report, “Achieving high-precision and reproducible measurements of the internal potential structure in reactor-grade fusion plasmas is extremely important as a fundamental database for future research on plasma control and reactor design.”

The LHD is the “world’s largest superconducting plasma confinement device,” and employs a heliotron magnetic configuration.

In the pursuit of fusion energy scientists must confine plasma at temperatures exceeding one hundred million degrees. The report added that “Therefore, accurately measuring the internal plasma potential is essential for improving the performance of future fusion reactors.”

To measure this potential, the LHD uses an HIBP system that injects a high-energy beam of gold ions (Au⁺) into the plasma. A clean, precise signal requires a very high-current beam.

However, there was a significant bottleneck. While their ion source could produce a strong beam of negative gold ions (Au⁻), the beam would expand because of its own “space-charge effect” before it could be properly injected into the main accelerator.

The report mentioned, “At higher beam currents, the beam expands due to the space-charge effect, resulting in significant beam loss before entering the tandem accelerator.”

Instead of a costly and/or complex hardware overhaul, the research team created a practical and compact solution. IGUN is a specialized program used in the design and optimization of particle optics devices, including electron and ion guns, beam transport sections and collectors. Using the ion-beam transport simulation code IGUN, they identified the exact cause of the beam expansion.

They then suggested reconfiguring the existing multistage accelerator, which sits between the ion source and the main tandem accelerator. By carefully optimizing the voltage distribution (voltage allocation) of the electrodes, they transformed the component into an electrostatic lens.

This new lens effectively focuses the high-current ion beam, preventing it from expanding and guiding it efficiently into the accelerator’s entrance.

Numerical simulations predicted that the new voltage configuration could reach a beam transmission efficiency exceeding ninety five percent

Subsequent plasma experiments confirmed the success of this approach, proving that the Au⁻ beam current successfully injected into the accelerator increased by a factor of two to three.

As a result, the high-energy Au⁺ beam injected into the plasma also increased, thereby expanding the HIBP’s measurable range up to a line-averaged electron density of one and three quarters times ten to the nineteenth per cubic meter.

The enhanced signal clarity allowed the detection of rapid, time-sensitive changes (temporal transitions) in the internal plasma potential as different heating systems were turned on and off.

the researchers concluded that “The method developed in this study provides a practical and compact solution for optimizing heavy ion beam transport and can be extended to other diagnostic systems and accelerator applications that require high-intensity beams.”

National Institute of Fusion Science

Iran says IAEA safeguards not built for wartime after strikes on nuclear sites jpost.com

Hokkaido governor OKs restart of Japan’s newest nuclear reactor at Tomari English.kyodonews.net

Nuclear Reboot to Bring Thousands of Jobs to South Carolina – FITSNews fitsnews.com

Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh proposed for first Indian SMRs world-nuclear-news.org

Latitude 47.704656 Longitude -122.318745

Ambient office = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 73 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 72 nanosieverts per hour

English cucumber from Central Market = 115

Tap water = 78 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 67 nanosieverts per hour

Fusion power innovator Helion Energy is building its seventh-generation fusion prototype to prove that its technology will deliver energy to the grid. It is also constructing a commercial power plant in Central Washington and establishing manufacturing operations to assemble future facilities.

David Kirtley is the CEO and co-founder of Helion. He said, “Our goal is not just to do fusion, not just to make energy, but to make electricity.”

Helion’s multi-track strategy is developing the prototype while standing up industrial-scale production. It reflects the belief that speed will be key once fusion is proven viable.

The company recently signed a lease near its Everett headquarters for a one hundred and sixty-six thousand square-foot space dubbed Omega. Helion will install an assembly line there to construct the thousands of capacitors needed to deliver massive surges of electricity to its fusion generator and capture the energy it produces.

Sofia Gizzi is the Helion’s director of production. She said, “Helion is a manufacturing company. It’s not an R&D company. It’s not a science experiment. It’s very much a manufacturing company.”

Helion has charted rapid growth in recent years. It has landed huge investments, hitting a headcount of more than five hundred employees, and spreading its footprint across an industrial region north of Seattle.

That expansion is built on the promise of fusion although no company or research institution has yet demonstrated it can create affordable electricity from fusion, the so-called Holy Grail of clean energy.

Data centers and AI expansion, plus economy-wide efforts to electrify transportation, building heating and cooling, and industrial operations are all hungry for clean power.

Microsoft is investing heavily in AI-related data center infrastructure. It has agreed to purchase the electricity produced by the fifty-megawatt Orion plant.

Melanie Nakagawa is Microsoft’s chief sustainability officer. She said, “While the path to commercial fusion is still unfolding, we’re proud to support Helion’s pioneering work here in Washington state as part of our broader commitment to investing in sustainable energy.

Constructing commercial fusion power plants requires more than physics breakthroughs. It also demands industrial muscle.

The company has long intended to keep its manufacturing and assembly in-house. This approach avoids external supply chain disruptions during the pandemic, could help skirt fluctuating tariffs and allow for quick adjustments as facility designs and operations are fine-tuned.

Standing inside Omega’s freshly painted space just near Helion’s headquarters, Gizzi explained that the proximity between engineering and manufacturing is strategic.

Gizzi added, “If you want to scale quickly, and if you want to be able to build an intelligent manufacturing process, you have to have [manufacturing] engineers with a really good understanding of how the thing works. And you have to have design engineers with a really good understanding of what’s hard about manufacturing.”

Helion’s manufacturing-first philosophy aligns with a broader push to restore U.S. production capacity. Washington state congressional leaders Senator Maria Cantwell and Representative Suzan DelBene recently introduced the bipartisan Fusion Advanced Manufacturing Parity Act. This legislation would provide large tax credits for fusion supply chain components.

Cantwell said in announcing the bill last month, “The state of Washington is the world’s leading hub for fusion energy, which one day soon could provide vast amounts of the type of power we need to keep electricity prices down and increase America’s economic competitiveness.”

Outside of public support, Helion raised four hundred twenty five million dollars in January specifically to finance its construction of the Omega facility. Investors in the funding round included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, steel manufacturer Nucor, Mithril Capital, SoftBank and others.

Helion will begin installing assembly line equipment inside the Omega facility early next year with production starting in late 2026.

The facility will help produce the roughly two thousand five hundred capacitor units needed for the Orion power plant in Malaga, Wash. They will be using both workers and robotics that include off-the-shelf and custom automation technology to significantly expedite the current processes.

Gizzi said, “These high-volume lines are not for our Orion machine, but for the next machine. A factory operating at 50% of its design capacity or less can spit out Orion, no problem. But we’re really looking beyond that into 2030.”

Helion