Bulgaria has shortlisted five companies to participate in the Belene nuclear power plant project. The applicants included three to be a strategic investor and two to be an equipment supplier.

The core of unit 5 at the Zaporozhe nuclear power plant in Ukraine has been fully loaded with VVER-1000 fuel produced by Westinghouse, operator Energoatom announced yesterday. In July 2018, unit 3 of the South Ukraine plant became the first VVER-1000 reactor anywhere to operate with a full core of fuel not supplied by Russia.

France's Orano will supply a second depleted uranium hexafluoride defluorination plant to TVEL's JSC Electrochemical Plant in Zelenogorsk in Russia's Krasnoyarsk Region under a EUR40 million (USD44 million) contract awarded by Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom. The first facility has been in operation at the site for ten years.

GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy is to decommission the reactor internals and reactor pressure vessel at the Pilgrim nuclear power plant under a contract awarded by Holtec International and SNC-Lavalin joint venture Comprehensive Decommissioning International, LLC.

Candu Energy Inc - a subsidiary of Canada's SNC-Lavalin - has been awarded a contract by China National Nuclear Power Co Ltd for pre-project work for a proposed two-unit Advanced Heavy Water Reactor plant in China. The work relates to planning and licensing in preparation for the project, construction of which is expected to start in or around 2021.

The Czech Republic expects to select the reactor vendor for a new unit at the Dukovany nuclear power plant by the end of 2022 with commissioning planned for 2036, Prime Minister Andrej Babis said yesterday. His comments followed a meeting of the Standing Committee for the Construction of New Nuclear Resources, which was created in February and has now produced a schedule for expansion of the Dukovany plant.

Atomenergomash, the engineering division of Russia’s Rosatom, has signed a contract for the supply of RITM-200 reactor units for two more nuclear icebreakers in Project 22220. The contract was signed between Atomenergomash subsidiary OKBM Afrikantov and the Baltic Shipyard.

French utility EDF has awarded a contract worth almost EUR100 million (USD111 million) to Orano to provide services to its Paluel, Civaux and Gravelines nuclear power plants. The contract runs until 2024, with an option for two additional years.

All licences and assets of unit 2 of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania will be transferred to a subsidiary of EnergySolutions under an agreement signed yesterday by US utility FirstEnergy and EnergySolutions. The reactor, which suffered a partial meltdown in 1979 and never reopened, will then be decommissioned.

EDF subsidiary Cyclife Sweden AB has signed an eight-year contract with Uniper for the treatment and recycling of contaminated metal generated through the decommissioning of Oskarshamn 1 and 2 and Barsebäck 1 and 2. Uniper has a common strategy for dismantling and demolishing the units, which were shut down between 1999 and 2017.

A contract for Tokamak machine assembly for the ITER International Fusion Energy Organisation signed by a consortium led by China Nuclear Power Engineering Corporation is the biggest nuclear energy project contract that Chinese companies have ever bid for in the European market.

Russia's Titan-2 - the main contractor for Fennovoima's Hanhikivi 1 nuclear power plant project in Finland - has awarded a contract to the Framatome-Siemens consortium for the plant's main instrumentation and control (I&C) systems.