The Clinton nuclear power plant operated safely in 2017, but will remain under increased oversight while awaiting further reviews from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on two minor violations reported last year, NRC officials said Wednesday in Clinton. Pantagraph.com

First Energy said it’s shutting down three of its nuclear power plants in Ohio and Pennsylania, including the plant in Shippingport, Beaver County. Wtae.com

French uranium mining and nuclear fuel group Orano, formerly called Areva, said its 2017 revenue fell 11 percent to 3.9 billion euros ($4.80 billion) and core earnings fell 30 percent to 946 million euros as demand for nuclear fuel remains low. Nasdaq.com

The operator of Romania’s nuclear power plant says one of the reactors has been disconnected from the grid due to a glitch in the electrical system. Foxnews.com

 

 

FirstEnergy Corp.’s Davis-Besse nuclear plant returned to service Tuesday from what will likely be its final refueling outage. Toledoblade.com

The No. 2 reactor at the Second Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei automatically shut down Wednesday because of a possible pressure problem, a day after resuming operations, state-run utility Taiwan Power Co. (Taipower) said. Taiwannews.com.tv

Westinghouse Electric Company’s reorganization plan – including its sale to Brookfield – has been approved by the US Bankruptcy Court. Westinghouse said the court’s approval of the plan is a “significant milestone in the company’s strategic restructuring”. World-nuclear-news.org

Centrus Energy Corp. said Wednesday it had signed a services contract with X Energy to support the design of a facility to produce advanced nuclear fuel, a contract that builds upon a memorandum of understanding the companies signed in September 2017 to collaborate toward production of fuel for advanced nuclear reactors. Nuclearstreet.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

        Spent nuclear fuel generates heat for decades and is radioactive for thousands of years. The used fuel is a combination of major actinides, fission products and minor actinides. Actinides are a group of 15 chemical elements with atomic numbers 89 to 103. The major actinides in used fuel are uranium and plutonium. Fission products in spent fuel are mainly metals including the lanthanides which have the atomic numbers 57 to 71. Cesium-137 and strontium-90 are fission products that decay in a few hundred years. Minor actinides such as americium, curium and neptunium as well as plutonium generate most of the heat and radioactivity after a few hundred years. The ability to remove americium and other minor actinides from spent nuclear fuel would reduce nuclear waste from spent nuclear fuel and make it easier to manage.  

      A research group at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has designed and synthesized a molecular trap. This trap can separate americium from a mixture of americium and lanthanides. In their research, they used europium as a typical lanthanide in the mixture. The americium caught in the trap could be used as fuel in nuclear reactors. The lanthanides in the mixture are what is referred to as “neutron poisons” which absorb neutron and dampen nuclear reactions. They must be disposed of in a permanent geological waste repository.

       The lead author of the study at ORNL said, “Nuclear energy, to reach a state of sustainability, will require used nuclear fuel to be recycled.” Such recycling requires the separation of minor actinides, Efficient separation methods would allow the establishment of a closed nuclear fuel recycling option. This is a tempting possibility in view of the fact that the U.S. only utilizes about one percent of the potential energy in nuclear fuel and does not recycle spent nuclear fuel.

       Organic chemical compounds called ligands can bind to metal atoms. In order to carry out separation of actinides, the metal and the ligand must align properly. Members of the ORNL team used computer modeling to predict that a rigid ligand with four atoms that could donate electrons would be an excellent trap for actinide atoms that are trivalent meaning that they have a net positive charge of three.

      Rigid ligands with a valence of negative charge of four do not occur in nature and had never been synthesized. It was suggested that a “unsaturated” ligand with single bonds and an organization that yielded the right pattern for grabbing an actinide would have to be synthesized. The ORNL computer models suggested that this would ideal for separating americium from lanthanides.

        The ORNL team turned to specialists in the synthesis of complex organic molecules for assistance. A “saturated” ligand called a cyclic amide was created with a nitrogen atom and a carbon atom double-bonded to oxygen. A double bond was induced in the amide ring system resulting in an “unsaturated” cyclic form. An unorganized ligand has pyridines that face away from each other. The introduction of a nitrogen base forces the pyridines to face the same way resulting in preoganization of the ligand.

      The synthesized ligand is referred to as tetradentate which means “four toothed”. It contains atoms that attract positively charged ions and donate electrons. The ligand has two nitrogen atoms and two oxygen atoms that align with atoms of americium. Although both saturated and unsaturated ligands will strongly bond with americium and europium, only unsaturated ligands are highly selective in bonding with americium.

Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority on Wednesday approved a plan to decommission the trouble-plagued Monju prototype fast-breeder nuclear reactor over the next 30 years. Mainichi.jp

North Korea has moved to halve troop strength at its Punggyeri nuclear test site, possibly signaling its hopes of an imminent rapprochement with the United States, according to well-placed sources. Asahi.com

The closure of the Pilgrim nuclear power plant in 2019 has many of the workers there wondering about their futures, and anti-nuclear power activists concerned about safety. Wbur.org

European Union ambassadors discussed on Wednesday possible new sanctions on Iran, diplomats said, under plans aimed at persuading U.S. President Donald Trump to preserve an international nuclear deal with Tehran. Usenews.com

 

 

 

 

       The proliferation of nuclear weapons is a global concern and most nations with nuclear arsenals are working to reduce their own stockpiles of nuclear weapons while discouraging non-nuclear nations from obtaining nuclear weapons. India is having problems obtaining some nuclear technology from other nations because of fear that the tech might be repurposed to help develop nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia is seeking assistance in the construction of nuclear power reactors but U.S. rules against export of dual-use technologies to countries that might use that technology for nuclear weapons production are impeding deals involving U.S. nuclear technologies companies.

      The United States and the United Kingdom are collaborating on a new joint program called the Advanced Instrumentation Testbed (AIT) which is dedicated to the development of tools that can help prevent nuclear proliferation. AIT is being sponsored by the National Nuclear Security Administration at the U.S. Department of Energy. The first project of AIT is the WATCHMAN antineutrino detector.

       WATCHMAN will be built by the AIT consortium which consists or which consists of Lawrence Livermore and Brookhaven national laboratories, the United Kingdom’s Atomic Weapons Establishment, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Irvine, Iowa State University, Penn State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, the University of Hawaii and the University of Sheffield, U.K.

       Physicists from the University of California, Davis are leading the WATCHMAN antineutrino detector project. The new detector will be constructed inside a closed potash mine near Boulby, Cheshire, in the U.K.

      WATCHMAN is an acronym that stands for WATer Cherenkov Monitor of Antineutrinos. It is designed to detect antineutrino particles generated by the nuclear power plant at Hartlepool which is about fifteen miles from Boulby. Ultimately, the goal is to create detectors that can pick up antineutrino production much further away that might be related to nuclear weapons production. WATCHMAN will be the first system that utilizes a scalable water-based technology to remotely monitor the activity at a single nuclear reactor.

       Neutrinos and antineutrinos are nuclear particles which have almost no mass and interact only weakly with other nuclear particles such as protons and neutrons. They can pass through the entire Earth without being stopped by interaction with normal matter. Neutrinos and antineutrino detectors are often located far underground where other types of nuclear particles from space will be screened out.

      The WATCHMAN detector will be a cylinder about fifty-three feet tall and about fifty-three feet in diameter lined with thousands of photomultiplier tubes. It will be filled with purified water to which gadolinium has been added. Gadolinium can capture neutrons. When an antineutrino enters the cylinder and triggers the release of a neutron in the water, it will trigger a very small flash of light when the gadolinium absorbs the neutron. 

       The UC Davis group is working on the ultrafast photomultiplier technology and finding new materials that can capture neutrinos and antineutrinos. The group has worked on other projects involving neutrinos and antineutrinos. The team hopes to have the WATCHMAN detector running in 2023.

 

 

Work to complete decommissioning of the Army’s remote nuclear power plant in Alaska has resumed after a long-term hiatus, officials said. Nuclearstreet.com

Britain’s Office for Nuclear regulation said that findings from the themed inspection of the Hinkley Point C nuclear build in Somerset showed five key supply chain areas where improvements could be made, but noted that “good progress had been made with improvements of some areas of supply chain management.” Nuclearstreet.com

Plans to build a nuclear reactor on Anglesey could lead to an increase in homelessness, according to the island’s housing services department. Bbc.com

Following last week’s announcement from Palestine, Venezuela this week joined six other ratifying countries in formally endorsing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Pressenza.com