The American Nuclear Society — the professional organization of nuclear engineers and scientists in the United States — published Position Statement #47 in January 2026. It is titled “Management of Surplus U.S. Nuclear Material.” It calls out uranium-233 specifically. And it says, in the clearest possible professional language, that what DOE is doing to our […]
Twenty years ago today, on the afternoon of Saturday, April 22, 2006, I started this blog and wrote the first post. I was thirty-one years old. I was working at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, as an aerospace engineer on nuclear-power concepts for deep-space missions. I was in my third year of […]
A recent article at Decouple examined the CANDU reactor as a potential destination for reprocessed uranium (RepU) from LWR spent fuel. The concept is straightforward: CANDU reactors run on natural uranium, and the U-235 remaining in spent LWR fuel exceeds the natural uranium threshold, so RepU blended with depleted uranium to produce a natural uranium […]
Elina Charatsidou is a Greek PhD student at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, where she researches accident-tolerant solid fuels for lead-cooled fast reactors — specifically uranium nitride and SIMFUEL pellets. Before her PhD she completed a master’s thesis internship at Westinghouse Electric, working on machine learning approaches to nuclear fuel fabrication. She […]
I just returned from two days in Reno, Nevada, where the Army Research Office’s DEVCOM ARO had convened a workshop at the University of Nevada titled “Closing the Gap: Research Priorities for U.S. REE Supply Chain Resilience.” Researchers from Idaho National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore, Colorado School of Mines, the University of Minnesota, and the National […]
There’s a genuinely exciting story coming out of Oak Ridge right now. Isotek Systems — the contractor operating at Building 3019 and Building 2026 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory — has extracted more than 17 grams of thorium-229 (Th-229) from the uranium-233 (U-233) inventory stored there. That represents a 1,700% increase in the world’s supply […]
Yesterday evening, at 8:25 PM Indian Standard Time, the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) at Kalpakkam in Tamil Nadu achieved first criticality — the initiation of a self-sustaining, controlled nuclear fission chain reaction. It is a milestone that has been a long time coming: more than two decades in the making, marked by repeated delays, […]
On March 17, 2026, the Alabama Senate adopted Senate Joint Resolution 89 by voice vote, and on March 31 it passed the full Legislature and was delivered to the Governor. SJR89 formally urges the Governor and relevant state agencies to recognize the value of spent nuclear fuel and take state actions toward its development. This […]
The Department of Energy has made several awards under their solicitation DE-FOA-0003364 and one of them was to Flibe Energy. The total funding was originally described as $10M but ended up being $19M in the final selection, divided among five awardees. DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy Awards $19 Million to Advance Recycling of Used Nuclear […]
The House Committee on Energy and Commerce met yesterday in a hearing entitled “American Energy Dominance: Dawn of the New Nuclear Era.” Several witnesses from the nuclear industry gave testimony and responded to questions. Representative Gary Palmer of the sixth Congression district of Alabama asked a question to Dr. John Wagner of Idaho National Laboratory […]