The International Atomic Energy Agency’s Director General Rafael Grossi said Oct. 9 a process has commenced to help restore external electricity to Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.
Zaporizhzhia, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, lost access to the grid in September, and has not gotten it back yet. It needs off-site power to cool its six shutdown reactors and spent fuel, and Grossi has been negotiating with both Russia and Ukraine to enable the plant to receive that power.
This is the tenth time Zaporizhzhia lost its connection to the grid throughout the conflict that began when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
A public information meeting on work at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is scheduled for Thursday Nov. 6 at Southeast New Mexico College in Carlsbad.
The meeting will start at 4 p.m. Mountain Time. The session will be available online and will be jointly conducted by DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office and Bechtel-led Salado Isolation Mining Contractors, which is the WIPP prime contractor.
Follow this link for more information, including how to do virtual registration.
Several state governors have teamed up on a coordinated approach to speeding development of advanced nuclear projects.
Working through the National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO), 11 states have issued a request for information (RFI) to create a scalable and rapid approach to deploying new nuclear reactors. The deadline for responding to the Advanced Nuclear First Mover Initiative is now Friday Oct. 17 at 5 p.m. Eastern Time.
The purpose of the Advanced Nuclear First Mover Initiative is to find opportunities to reduce the financial and technological risk and form private partnerships and streamline federal permitting, according to a NASEO Feb. 5 press release. According to the solicitation, the states are looking for information on three types of nuclear reactors: AP1000s, small modular reactors (SMRs) for power generation and SMRs for thermal generation.
Fluor completed the sale of 15 million shares of its Class A common stock of NuScale Power on Oct. 9 which resulted in net proceeds of $605 million.
Fluor has had a longstanding investment in NuScale since 2011. The completed sale of the stock was converted in August and reflects a gain of over 300% since NuScale, the small modular reactor company, went public in May 2022, according to Fluor’s Oct. 9 press release.
The sale was filed on the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) website on Oct. 8. Fluor said it intends to use a majority of the earnings from the sale to enhance its ongoing share repurchase program.
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll on Tuesday offered more insight on his forthcoming plan for a “complete revamping” of the service’s acquisition enterprise, which he said will focus on a “consolidation and a streamlining of how we buy things as an Army.”
While he said specific details remain under wraps for now, Driscoll addressed potentially reforming the Army’s “siloed” program executives and an interest in expanding flexible funding authorities to more capability portfolios. “We basically need a wholesale rethinking of how we purchase things,” Driscoll told reporters at the Association of the U.S. Army Conference in Washington, D.C.
In an address at the conference on Monday, Driscoll teased plans for major acquisition reforms in the coming weeks and pressed for shedding older equipment and more rapidly fielding innovative capabilities, bringing in private capital investment for Army projects and advocating for the service to adopt a Silicon Valley-minded business model.