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The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has approved GE Vernova's nuclear fuel business to manufacture, ship and analyse the performance of nuclear fuel with uranium-235 enrichments of up to 8%.

Date: Friday, 16 February 2024
Original article: world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/GNF-gets-approval-to-manufacture-higher-enrichment

Firm running five test programmes in US and Europe Framatome deployed the world’s first full ATF assembly at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear station in the US state of Maryland. French nuclear company Framatome is running five test programmes for accident-tolerant fuel in the US and Europe and is confident that it will “only be a few years” before it is producing full reload quantities, Ala Alzaben, senior vice-president for the firm’s North America fuel business unit and commercial and customer centre told NucNet.

Last year, during a scheduled spring refuelling outage, Framatome deployed the world’s first full ATF assembly at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear station in the US state of Maryland.

This followed the launching in 2012 of the US Department of Energy ATF initiative in response to the 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi accident in Japan. The DOE set three main objectives: to develop a fuel to allow nuclear operators additional coping time during accidents; to launch and deploy lead test assemblies by 2022; and to make sure improvements do not impact the operational performance of the fuel.

Mr Alzaben said Framatome had met the DOE’s schedule and has deployed lead test assemblies in five reactors, four in the US and one in Europe.

Date: Tuesday, 26 April 2022
Original article: nucnet.org/news/french-company-aiming-to-produce-full-reload-quantities-of-accident-tolerant-fuel-4-2-2022

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said on 13 July it was leading an effort, working with the Department of Energy (DOE), to advance space nuclear technologies. The government team has selected three reactor design concept proposals for a nuclear thermal propulsion system. The reactor is a critical component of a nuclear thermal engine, which would utilise high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel.

Date: Friday, 16 July 2021
Original article: neimagazine.com/news/newsnasa-announces-funding-for-nuclear-thermal-propulsion-reactor-8898302

New accident tolerant fuel (ATF) developed by France’s Framatome is being tested at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), the US Office of Nuclear Energy (ONE) announced on 15 June. The fuel was recently installed for testing at INL’s Advanced Test Reactor (ATR). This is the second experiment currently in progress in the ATR that is being developed through the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) accident tolerant fuel programme. Earlier this year, General Electric (GE) installed ATF fuel cladding at the commercial Edwin I. Hatch NPP in Georgia. ATF has advanced cladding and fuel pellet designs that increase its safety and performance. The program was developed in 2012 after the Fukushima accident to bring new advanced fuel concepts to market by 2025.

Date: Friday, 22 June 2018
Original article: neimagazine.com/news/newsframatome-tests-atf-fuel-at-us-national-laboratory-6216484