The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has issued a request for proposals (RFP) for uranium enrichment and storage services as part of a measure aimed at stimulating a domestic supply chain for high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU). The action follows an RFP released in November 2023 for services to deconvert enriched uranium into metal, oxide, and other forms for advanced reactor fuel.

The agency’s formal issuance of an RFP for uranium enrichment services on Jan. 9 opens the selection process for Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contracts geared toward the DOE’s acquisition of HALEU as uranium hexafluoride (UF₆), which will be domestically enriched up <20% by weight as uranium-235 (U-235).

If selected, contractors will be required to store the HALEU UF₆, as well as provide transportation of the material to deconversion facilities, if not co-located at the enrichment facility. In addition, the “feed uranium for enrichment to HALEU UF₆ must have been mined and converted, and not come from a source that was recycled or reprocessed. However, the use of tails will not be restricted,” the agency noted.

The DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy on Tuesday said it plans to award one or more contracts to produce HALEU from domestic uranium enrichment capabilities. HALEU enrichment contracts will have a maximum duration of 10 years, and the government will “assure” each contractor a minimum order value of $2 million to be fulfilled over the term of the contract. The total contract ceiling for the IDIQ contract is $2.7 billion for all task orders cumulatively awarded under the RFP, the DOE said.

Building Out the Domestic HALEU Supply Chain

The measure marks the newest step by the Biden administration to expand the domestic HALEU supply chain for advanced commercial reactors. While the existing U.S. fleet runs on uranium fuel enriched up to 5% with uranium-235 (U-235), HALEU is a nuclear material enriched between 5% to 20%. The material has several uses in fuel for advanced reactors, including molten salt reactors or tristructural isotropic (TRISO). HALEU may also be used in operating reactors (enriched between 5% and 10%), offering better performance.

While Russia remains the world’s only commercial supplier of HALEU, the DOE in recent years has taken critical steps to build out a U.S. HALEU front-end supply chain. Domestic HALEU production is currently dependent on “downblending,” which involves blending existing or recovered highly enriched uranium (HEU) to form uranium of a lower enrichment. However, the DOE has said limited HEU stocks are available for downblending beyond those obligated to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

Uranium enrichment involves “enriching” the U-235 isotope in a multi-step process. Mined uranium consists of about 99.3% U-238 and 0.7% U-235, which is fissionable when enriched to beyond 3% (as well as less than 0.01% of U-234). At a conversion plant, uranium oxide is converted from powder into a UF₆, a gas whose fluorine element does not contribute to the weight difference while separating U-235 from U-238. Honeywell recently reopened Metropolis Works plant in Metropolis, Illinois—the U.S.’s sole uranium conversion facility.

During enrichment, the UF₆ gas is separated into two streams, one with more U-235 than before and the other with less. Centrus Energy and Urenco, which host the nation’s only enrichment capacities, utilize gas centrifuge technology. The technology utilizes many rotating cylinders connected in long lines to create a strong centrifugal force. After enrichment, the UF₆ must be “deconverted” to a uranium form (to include oxides, metal and alloys, and nitrides and carbides) suitable for fuel fabrication. As POWER has reported, a HALEU supply chain will require deconversion processes that accommodate different fuel forms for advanced reactors.

Over the near term, the DOE has been working to provide small quantities of HALEU from recycling, though these are limited to DOE inventories. The DOE also plans to leverage HALEU enrichment capabilities demonstrated by Centrus under a DOE contract. Centrus in October 2023 kicked off enrichment operations at its American Centrifuge Plant cascade in Piketon, Ohio. In November 2023, the company announced the production of its first 20 kilograms (kg) of HALEU. Under its contract with the DOE, the facility is slated to produce 900 kg for a full year.

The DOE will own HALEU produced from the demonstration cascade, and Centrus will be compensated on a cost-plus-incentive-fee basis. Centrus has said, however, that the contract also gives the DOE options “to pay for up to nine additional years of production from the cascade beyond the base contract.” However, “those options are at the Department’s sole discretion and subject to the availability of Congressional appropriations,” it notes.

A Longer-Term Vision

To establish a commercial HALEU supply in the U.S. over the longer term, the DOE in June 2023 issued two draft requests for HALEU acquisition proposals (RFPs). The measure is furnished by $700 million allocated by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to support activities under the HALEU Availability Program (which Congress established in the Energy Act of 2020). Both draft RFPs, which will leverage up to $500 million from the IRA funding, have now been finalized.

The first RFP, issued on Nov. 28, 2023, focuses on deconversion activities to convert enriched UF₆ gas into metal or oxide forms, which can be used to fabricate fuels needed by several advanced reactor developers. Proposals are due on Jan. 30. The RFP issued on Tuesday focuses on acquiring services for the enrichment and storage of HALEU material. Proposals are due on March 8, 2023.

The DOE is in tandem also finalizing a transportation funding opportunity announcement that will provide a Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) pathway for HALEU transportation packages. Additionally, the DOE is preparing an environmental impact statement that will analyze the impacts of a DOE-proposed action to facilitate the domestic commercialization of HALEU production and acquire HALEU for commercial use on demonstration projects, including those demonstrations under the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP).

The first two ARDP demonstrations, spearheaded by TerraPower and X-energy, will require about 22 metric tons of HALEU for their initial cores. X-energy’s fuel manufacturing process requires HALEU in the oxide form while TerraPower’s requires HALEU in the metal form. Construction on TerraPower’s Natrium project in Wyoming, notably, has been delayed until 2025, owing to a lack of HALEU availability.

In mid-December, Dr. Michael Goff, principal deputy assistant secretary for the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy, revealed the agency is also developing a “novel technologies funding opportunity announcement that will focus on lowering energy inputs, lowering capital costs, and developing technologies that will provide significant economic advantages to the front end of the fuel cycle.”

The DOE has so far established a “HALEU Consortium,” a public-private coordination effort to help inform activities by the DOE to stimulate domestic HALEU demand. “The roles of the HALEU consortium of which HALEU recipients need to be a  member, include providing HALEU demand estimates, carrying out demonstration projects, and developing a schedule for cost recovery for commercial use,” Goff noted.

While the DOE’s efforts are aimed at establishing a domestic HALEU supply chain, it noted the U.S. is collaborating with Canada, France, Japan, and the UK to “catalyze public and private sector investments that will expand global uranium enrichment and conversion capacity over the next three years and establish a resilient uranium supply market that is free from Russian influence.”

The five countries— which are collectively responsible for 50% of the world’s uranium conversion and enrichment production capacity—on Dec. 7 announced plans to mobilize $4.2 billion in government-led investments to develop a secure, reliable global nuclear energy supply chain. The investments are geared to enhance uranium enrichment and conversion capacity over the next three years “and establish a resilient global uranium supply market free from Russian influence.” 

Earlier this week, the UK’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero announced a £300 million ($382 million) investment to support HALEU production as part of a program that would support its goals to expand its nuclear capacity to 24 GW by 2050.

—Sonal Patel is a POWER senior associate editor (@sonalcpatel, @POWERmagazine).

JANUARY 10, 2024
New York Times Minimizes Impacts of Three Mile Island
BY KARL GROSSMAN

Image courtesy of Exelon.

The New York Times minimized the impacts of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident in its obituary this week for Joseph Hendrie, the chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission at the time of the accident. Hendrie was removed from the NRC chairmanship eight months after the accident because, as then President Jimmy Carter put it, under Hendrie’s helm the NRC was “unable to fulfill its responsibility for providing an acceptable level of safety for nuclear power plants.”

The Times reported that in its obituary for Hendrie.

There was a “pull quote” in the middle of The Times piece: “He was fired after the meltdown at the nuclear power plant.”

But a reader would not know exactly what the problem was by reading the obituary Monday, written by Trip Gabriel, a national correspondent of The Times.

Of the Three Mile Island accident, “Minimal radioactivity was released, and there were no immediate deaths,” Gabriel writes in its fourth paragraph. “But official miscommunication and lingering confusion over the severity of the threat inflamed a long-running national debate about nuclear safety. Movie theatres that year were showing ‘The China Syndrome,’ a hit thriller about a nuclear plant disaster. Nearly 200,000 protesters turned out in New York City six months after Three Mile Island for an antinuclear rally.”

Among researchers determining that there were substantial deaths as a result of Three Mile Island radiation releases have been Steven Wing and his colleagues at the University of North Carolina. “Study Links Three Mile Island Radiation Releases to Higher Cancer Rates,” was the 1997 article by Joby Warrick in the Washington Post.

It began: “Researchers have linked radiation releases from the Three Mile Island nuclear plant to higher cancer rates in nearby communities in a study that could reopen debate over the nation’s worst commercial nuclear accident. The report, released today, concludes that increases in lung cancer and leukemia near the Pennsylvania plant suggest a much greater release of radiation during the 1979 accident than had been believed. Previous studies concluded that radiation exposure to humans was minimal. A 1990 Columbia University analysis using the same data as the new study found no clear connection between the accident and cancer rates among residents living near the plant.”

It quoted Wing, an associate professor of epidemiology, saying: “The cancer findings, along with studies of animals, plants and chromosomal damage in Three Mile Island area residents, all point to much higher radiation levels than were previously reported.”

The research was published in Environmental Health Perspectives, the journal of the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Science.

Science magazine in a 1997 article reported that “After reexamining the region’s cancer statistics and measured radiation levels, epidemiologist Steven Wing and his colleagues at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, concluded that more radiation may have escaped than was measured and that the risk of some cancers did rise. Wing found that people presumed to have been exposed to the highest doses of radiation were almost twice as likely to develop lung cancer as were those who received the lowest doses. His team also found that the risk of adult leukemia was almost seven times higher for those in the highest exposure group.

The book “Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation” devotes many pages to the Three Mile Island accident including in a chapter titled “People Died at Three Mile Island.” Published in 1982, it was authored by Harvey Wasserman, a journalist who has specialized in nuclear power; Norman Solomon, an investigative reporter and media critic; and Robert Alvarez and Eleanor Walters, director of and associate director of the Environmental Policy Center in Washington, D.C. Alvarez also was senior policy adviser to the U.S. Energy Department secretary and a senior investigator for the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs.

The book presents research done on cancer and the Three Mile Island accident including that of Dr. Ernest Sternglass, long professor of radiation physics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. It quotes Sternglass in 1981 stating: “The Three Mile Island accident will turn out to have produced the largest death toll ever resulting from an industrial accident, with total deaths from all causes likely to reach many thousands over the next 10 to 20 years.”

I wrote and presented a TV documentary in 1993, “Three Mile Island Revisited,” beginning with, standing with the Three Mile Island plant in the background, saying: “The nuclear industry says that nobody died because of the accident back there at Three Mile Island but don’t tell that to the people here in Goldsboro or others living in what’s become a valley of death surrounding Three Mile Island.”

I conducted interviews about how cancer had become widespread in and around Goldsboro and how quietly the owner of Three Mile Island had given cash settlements, some as high a $1 million, to members of families of those who died or were left with health impacts as a result of the accident.

A superb new documentary on Three Mile Island is “Radioactive: The Women of Three Mile Island” which was released last year and is being widely shown throughout the world. Directed, written and produced by Heidi Hutner, a professor of environmental humanities at Stony Brook University, it has received many awards.

In it, resident after resident of the area around Three Mile Island is interviewed and tells of widespread cancer that has ensued in the years that have followed the accident—a cancer rate far beyond what would be normal. Accounts shared in the documentary are heartbreaking.

In “Radioactive,” a whistleblower who had worked at the nuclear plant tells Hutner of the deliberate and comprehensive attempt by General Public Utilities, which owned TMI, to cover up the gravity of the accident and its radioactive releases, especially of cancer-causing Iodine-131 and Xenon 133.

An attorney, Lynne Bernabei, involved in litigation in the wake of the accident, says the Three Mile Island “cover-up was one of the biggest cover-ups in history.”

The Times obituary for Hendrie, a physicist, points out that he was a booster of nuclear power. It relates: “Dr. Hendrie, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 to lead the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the government agency in charge of nuclear power safety, came in as a proponent of nuclear energy, criticized by environmentalists as too supportive of the industry.” It quotes Hendrie as saying when he was appointed: “My biggest challenge will be to keep nuclear power as a viable energy option.” Gabriel writes that Hendrie “pledged to end ‘the tortuous and Kafkaesque hearings’ on proposed nuclear plants.”

And even though Hendrie was bounced from the NRC chairmanship in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident, he “remained one of the five members of the regulatory commission through the end of his four-year term in June 1981,” it adds. And, “in March of that year, President Ronald Reagan reappointed him chairman in an acting capacity.”

Then Hendrie, the obituary continues, “returned to the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., where he had worked for two decades before joining the regulatory commission. In the 1960s, he had helped design and build a type of research reactor, the High Flux Beam Reactor, which provided very intense beams of neutrons.”

There was no mention in The Times obituary about what happened to the High Flux Beam Reactor. It was shut down in 1997 after it was found to be leaking radioactive tritium into the groundwater under Brookhaven National Laboratory—groundwater that flows into the community just south of the laboratory, Shirley. “Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town” was published in 2008, written by Kelly McMasters, a professor at Hofstra University who grew up in Shirley. In the book, she writes of the widespread cancer among people in Shirley which she links to the “nearby leaking nuclear laboratory.” Hendrie’s Brookhaven National Laboratory is a Superfund high-pollution site.

The obituary ends with a paragraph in which Gabriel writes: “Most recently, new interest has arisen in nuclear power as the largest source of non-carbon emitting energy at a time of heightened awareness of the climate crisis.” Not mentioned is how the nuclear fuel cycle—including mining, milling and enrichment—is carbon-intensive, and nuclear power plants, as did that High Flux Beam Reactor, emit carbon, radioactive Carbon-14.

I started writing my first book on nuclear power the day of the news of the Three Mile Island meltdown happening. In the book, first published in 1980, “Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power,” in a chapter with a focus on the press and nuclear power, I quote Alden Whitman, a reporter at The New York Times for 25 years, telling me that “there certainly was never any effort made to do” in-depth or investigative reporting on nuclear power. Why this attitude? “The Times does regard itself as part of the establishment…They get nervous when they attack industry. Certainly when they attack industry that is heavily involved in finance and the banks as nuclear power is, they would get very up tight.” Even in the wake of Three Mile Island, said Whitman, The Times’ stories on nuclear power have been “tucked away, put in the middle of the paper.”

This tradition continues at The New York Times.

Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, and is the author of the book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet, and the Beyond Nuclear handbook, The U.S. Space Force and the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear war in space. Grossman is an associate of the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion.

Joseph Hendrie, 98, Dies; Key Figure in the Three Mile Island Crisis

He was chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1979, when America faced its worst nuclear power mishap in history.

By Trip Gabriel

Jan. 6, 2024

Joseph M. Hendrie, a physicist who led the Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the country’s worst nuclear power accident, at Three Mile Island — a mishap that chilled Americans’ trust in nuclear energy for decades — died on Dec. 26 at his home in Bellport, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 98.

His daughter Barbara Hendrie confirmed the death.

An expert in nuclear reactor safety, Dr. Hendrie was chairman of the commission on March 28, 1979, when a commercial reactor located on an island in the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania experienced a sudden loss of cooling water and a partial meltdown of its radioactive fuel.

Two days later, on Dr. Hendrie’s advice, the governor of Pennsylvania ordered the evacuation of pregnant women and preschool children within five miles of the area.

Minimal radioactivity was released, and there were no immediate deaths. But official miscommunication and lingering confusion over the severity of the threat inflamed a long-running national debate about nuclear safety. Movie theaters that year were showing “The China Syndrome,” a hit thriller about a nuclear plant disaster. Nearly 200,000 protesters turned out in New York City six months after Three Mile Island for an antinuclear rally.

Dr. Hendrie, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 to lead the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the government agency in charge of nuclear power safety, came in as a proponent of nuclear energy, criticized by environmentalists as too supportive of the industry.

Image

“My biggest challenge will be to keep nuclear power as a viable energy option,” he told Newsday, his local paper, when he was appointed. He pledged to end “the tortuous and Kafkaesque hearings” on proposed nuclear plants.

But the president fired Dr. Hendrie eight months after Three Mile Island, following a blistering report by a presidential commission that called for sweeping changes in how nuclear plants were built and regulated.

The report did not fault Dr. Hendrie by name. But it was critical of the regulatory commission, saying it was “unable to fulfill its responsibility for providing an acceptable level of safety for nuclear power plants.” Mr. Carter said a change of leadership at the commission was needed “in the spirit” of the recommendations he received.

Victor Gilinsky, who served on the commission with Dr. Hendrie, described him in an interview as a nonbureaucratic type, “given to outbursts of honesty,” whose candor may have led to his dismissal.

In the days after the accident, when asked at a news conference in Maryland about worst-case scenarios, Dr. Hendrie had said it might be necessary to evacuate residents as far as 20 miles from the site. Gov. Richard L. Thornburgh of Pennsylvania was upset, Dr. Gilinsky said, and complained to President Carter. “That’s what forced him out; he was giving his honest opinion.”

Though he lost the chairman’s job, Dr. Hendrie remained one of the five members of the regulatory commission through the end of his four-year term in June 1981. In March of that year, President Ronald Reagan reappointed him chairman in an acting capacity.

He returned to the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., where he had worked for two decades before joining the regulatory commission. In the 1960s, he had helped design and build a type of research reactor, the High Flux Beam Reactor, which provided very intense beams of neutrons. Scientists from far and wide came to Brookhaven to use it for their experiments.

“He was one of those rare individuals who possessed a deep technical understanding of nuclear science and engineering and the ability to successfully manage a large and diverse work force supporting many nuclear related activities, including both theoretical and experimental work,” Joseph P. Indusi, a former colleague of Dr. Hendrie’s at Brookhaven, said in an email.

In 1984, when Dr. Hendrie became president of the American Nuclear Society, a professional group for nuclear engineers, he told its publication, Nuclear News, that he had few regrets about leaving a high-profile government career for a quieter life of research.

“On balance, I’m glad to be out of it,” he said. “The stress level is high enough so that it’s a very wearing proposition. You just drain down your internal reserves. But it’s also a very exciting enterprise, and I miss the hurrah from time to time.”

Joseph Mallam Hendrie was born on March 18, 1925, in Janesville, Wis. His father, Joseph Munier Hendrie, was an executive at General Motors who moved the family to the Detroit area. His mother, Pearl (Hocking) Hendrie, was a homemaker.

During World War II, Dr. Hendrie served in the Army Corps of Engineers in the Pacific. He graduated from Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland (now part of Case Western Reserve University) in 1950 with a degree in physics, then earned a Ph.D. in the same subject from Columbia University in 1957.

He met his future wife, Elaine Kostel, an instructor at an Arthur Murray dance studio in Cleveland, on a blind date. She later worked in public relations for the Navy. She died in 2019.

Besides his daughter Barbara, Dr. Hendrie is survived by another daughter, Susan Hendrie-Marais; a grandson; and a sister, Jane Heinemen.

In the first uncertain week after the Three Mile Island accident, there were fears verging on panic that the reactor could melt down and release devastating radioactivity. That never came to pass, although the full extent of the damage was not learned until years later, when it was determined that 50 percent of the reactor’s nuclear fuel had melted.

The accident was triggered by a stuck valve, compounded by human error. The result was that not enough cooling water was reaching the reactor core, which led to damage and the release of a “small amount of radioactive material,” according to the Department of Energy.

Several studies of long-term health effects found no increase in several types of cancer caused by radiation in the region.

Still, Three Mile Island froze the development of nuclear power in the U.S. for decades. For 32 years after the accident, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued no new permits for reactors. Since 2010, only two new reactors have come online, while a dozen shut down before their licenses expired because they were not economical.

More recently, new interest has arisen in nuclear power as the largest source of non-carbon-emitting energy at a time of heightened awareness of the climate crisis. Gallup polling last year found more support for nuclear power than at any time since 2012. The Biden administration has directed $6 billion from an infrastructure law to bail out economically shaky reactors, which provide about half of the nation’s carbon-free electricity.

A correction was made on Jan. 6, 2024: An earlier version of this obituary misstated the year of a Gallup poll that found more support for nuclear power than at any time since 2012. It was last year, not this year.

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When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.

Almost exactly one year ago, NuScale Power made history as the first of a new generation of nuclear energy startups to win regulatory approval of its reactor design ― just in time for the Biden administration to begin pumping billions of federal dollars into turning around the nation’s atomic energy industry.

But as mounting costs and the cancellation of its landmark first power plant have burned through shrinking cash reserves, the Oregon-based company is laying off as much 40% of its workforce, HuffPost has learned.

At a virtual all-hands meeting Friday afternoon, the company announced the job cuts to remaining employees. HuffPost reviewed the audio of the meeting. Two sources with direct knowledge of NuScale’s plans confirmed the details of the layoffs.

By Friday evening, NuScale’s stock price had plunged more than 8% as investors sold off shares. NuScale did not respond to a call, an email or a text message seeking comment.

Surging construction costs are imperiling clean energy across the country. In just the past two months, developers have pulled the plug on major offshore wind farms in New Jersey and New York after state officials refused to let companies rebid for contracts at a higher rate.

But the financial headwinds are taking an especially acute toll on nuclear power. It takes more than a decade to build a reactor, and the only new ones under construction in the U.S. and Europe went billions of dollars over budget in the past two decades. Many in the atomic energy industry are betting that small modular reactors ― shrunken down, lower-power units with a uniform design ― can make it cheaper and easier to build new nuclear plants through assembly-line repetition.

The U.S. government is banking on that strategy to meet its climate goals. The Biden administration spearheaded a pledge to triple atomic energy production worldwide in the next three decades at the United Nations’ climate summit in Dubai last month, enlisting dozens of partner nations in Europe, Asia and Africa.

The two infrastructure-spending laws that President Joe Biden signed in recent years earmark billions in spending to develop new reactors and keep existing plants open. And new bills in Congress to speed up U.S. nuclear deployments and sell more American reactors abroad are virtually all bipartisan, with progressives and right-wing Republicans alike expressing support for atomic energy.

But the U.S. trails rivals like China and Russia in deploying new types of reactors, including those based on technologies that scientists working for the federal government first developed.

Until November, NuScale appeared on track to debut the nation’s first atomic energy station powered with small modular reactors. But the project to build a dozen reactors in the Idaho desert, and sell the electricity to ratepayers across the Western U.S. through a Utah state-owned utility, was abandoned as rising interest rates made it harder for NuScale to woo investors willing to bet on something as risky a first-of-its-kind nuclear plant.

In 2022, NuScale went public via a SPAC deal, a type of merger that became a popular way for debt-laden startups to pay back venture capitalists with a swifter-than-usual initial public offering on the stock market.

In its latest quarterly earnings, NuScale reported just under $200 million in cash reserves, nearly 40% of which was tied up in restricted accounts.

On a call with analysts in November, Ramsey Hamady, NuScale’s chief financial officer, said the firm expected to “take in about $50 million worth of cash from customers from work that we do.”

But the firm spent more than that in the previous three-month cycle ― a function, the executive said, of how project costs fluctuate regularly.

“This isn’t just a fixed-expense business. There’s variable expense, and there’s a lot of discretionary spending,” Hamady said. “We spend more as we have contracts, and we pull in our spending as contracts either get pushed out or delayed or whether we want to focus more on discretionary spend or nondiscretionary spend.”

Did you just lose your job at NuScale or another green energy company? Our reporter wants to hear from you. Email Alexander C. Kaufman at alexander.kaufman@huffpost.com, or text him securely on the encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 631-455-8855.

NuScale, which has four other projects proposed in the U.S. and tentative deals in at least eight other countries, isn’t the only nuclear startup navigating choppy waters.

In October, Maryland-based X-energy, which is working with the federal government to develop a next-generation reactor using gas instead of water for cooling, cut part of its workforce and scrapped plans to go public.

In September, California-based Oklo appeared to lose a more than $100 million contract to build its its liquid-metal-cooled “micro-reactors” at an Air Force base in Alaska, as the independent Northern Journal newsletter first reported. But the Defense Department said in a statement that the deal was never finalized, and that the bureaucratic change that took place in the fall and appeared to revoke Oklo’s contract was a misunderstood procedural technicality. Oklo said it’s on track with plans to start selling shares on the New York Stock Exchange later this year.

Nor are the nuclear industry’s high-tech newcomers the only ones with issues.

The U.S. utilities that operate the world’s largest fleet of traditional reactors balked last month at the Biden administration’s proposed regulations for making clean hydrogen fuel. Constellation, the country’s top nuclear operator, said the rules rendered existing reactors ineligible for a lucrative tax credit for making hydrogen with carbon-free electricity, and threatened to sue the administration.

SMITH COLLECTION/GADO VIA GETTY IMAGES

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nearly two years ago triggered an energy shock as European democracies scrambled to find alternatives to buying natural gas from Moscow. The constant need to replenish pipelines using a fuel with a wildly fluctuating price put a new premium on nuclear energy’s steady 24-hour output without needing refueling for two years or more. To boot, nuclear reactors don’t produce planet-heating emissions, and they generate orders of magnitude more electricity, more frequently and on less land, than solar panels or wind turbines.

Yet as the U.S. and its allies sanctioned the oil and gas exports funding Russia’s war chest, the Kremlin’s state-owned nuclear company, Rosatom, has remained immune, since American and European reactors depend on fuel that it enriches. Russia is building most of the new reactors in the works in places like Bangladesh, Egypt and Turkey, and just signed a new deal for more in India.

China, meanwhile, is constructing more reactors at home than nearly all the world combined, and built four large-scale reactors using the leading new American design before the U.S. could complete its first.

Former President Donald Trump banned U.S. nuclear companies from working in China, a prohibition Biden has maintained. In December, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to ban Russian uranium imports. While it’s unlikely to become law, the U.S. last year finally took the first step toward supplying its own nuclear fuel again.

At an industrial site in Ohio this past autumn, the private company that succeeded what was once the U.S. government’s in-house nuclear fuel enricher began producing the American-made alternative to a special kind of uranium fuel that companies like Oklo need. In just the last few months, three new uranium mines have entered into production in Arizona and Utah.

There’s a clear demand. The price of uranium eclipsed $91 per pound this week for the first time since the 2011 Fukushima disaster.

COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA 
Dept. of Environmental Protection
Commonwealth News Bureau
Room 308, Main Capitol Building
Harrisburg PA., 17120 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
01/2/2024

CONTACT: 
DEP Newsroom
717-787-1323 


DEP Highlights National Radon Action Month, Provides Free Radon Test Kits
Testing for radon is one of the easiest actions Pennsylvanians can take to keep their homes safe and families healthy
 

Harrisburg, PA – January is National Radon Action Month, marking a time of increased outreach and public awareness for this serious health hazard. 

Radon is a colorless, odorless, radioactive gas that occurs naturally through the breakdown of uranium in soil and rocks. It can seep into homes through cracks in basements and foundations, then build up inside to concentrations many times the recommended level. 

“Radon is the second-leading cause of lung cancer after smoking in the United States, and is a serious concern within the Commonwealth,” said Jessica Shirley, Interim Acting Secretary, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). “The Department of Environmental Protection remains committed to working with home builders, school districts, realtors, and other Pennsylvania departments to address radon issues and keeping all Pennsylvanians safe.” 

Radon is responsible for an estimated 21,000 lung cancer deaths every year in the U.S., according to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and about 40 percent of Pennsylvania homes have radon levels above the EPA action level of 4.0 pCi/L (picocuries per liter). While radon problems may be more common in some regions, there is potential for any home to have high radon levels. 

Pennsylvania is particularly prone to elevated radon levels, and the only way homeowners can know for certain if they have a radon problem is to test their home. DEP recommends that all homes, public and private buildings get tested. The best time to test is during the colder months, when homes and buildings are closed and radon is most likely to be trapped and build up to higher levels. 

DEP and the American Lung Association are working together to provide radon test kits to Pennsylvania residents who have not yet tested their homes for this dangerous gas. Free radon test kits are available throughout the Commonwealth from the American Lung Association, while supplies last. Test kits are funded through a grant from DEP and the EPA State Indoor Radon Grant Program. 

“Radon in homes is more common than many people think. Exposure to radon shouldn’t be taken lightly because it is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States,” said Kevin M. Stewart, Director of Environmental Health for the American Lung Association. “The good news is that it is easy to test for radon. Do-it-yourself test kits are simple to use and inexpensive.” 

Radon test kits are also available at many home improvement and hardware stores, as well as from Pennsylvania-certified radon laboratories. Radon test kits typically cost approximately $20-$30. Completed test kits are sent to a Pennsylvania-certified lab where the sample is analyzed, and the results are sent to the home or building owner. Homeowners are also able to hire a state-certified radon testing company to do the testing for them. The public is encouraged to call DEP’s Radon Division at 717-783-3594, or the Radon Hotline at 800-237-2366, for help with interpretation of their test results and what follow-up action may be necessary.  

Permanent radon mitigation systems typically cost between $800 and $1,200 and require minimal maintenance. A list of state-certified radon contractors, labs, and testers is available on DEP’s website. The list is also available by calling 1-800-23-RADON.