France's EDF has signed a Letter of Intent with Italy's Ansaldo Energia, Ansaldo Nucleare and Edison to assess potential industrial cooperation for the development of nuclear power in Europe, including in Italy, specifically in the field of small modular reactors.

Swedish lead-cooled small nuclear reactor technology developer LeadCold is to conduct a feasibility study on the construction and operation of a demonstration SEALER (Swedish Advanced Lead Reactor) with associated infrastructure for fuel fabrication in Studsvik.

Tomsk Polytechnic University and TVEL have launched a project to use electric discharges to speed up the decontamination of radioactive concrete. The aim is to allow decontamination of several square metres per hour.

Advanced nuclear fuel technology company Lightbridge and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have completed a collaborative project to demonstrate Lightbridge's nuclear fuel casting process using depleted uranium under the US Department of Energy's Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear voucher programme.

The Canadian government has launched a programme to support the commercial development of small modular reactors, providing CAD29.6 million (USD21.8 million) of funding over four years to develop supply chains for SMR manufacturing and fuel supply and security, and to fund research on safe SMR waste management solutions.

Ontario Tech University has begun pre-licensing activities for a new facility to support its undergraduate nuclear engineering programmes and for applied nuclear engineering research. The facility will be unique in Canada.

Test flights of drones fitted with equipment to identify and measure the radiation being emitted from a plume source have been conducted at the Mol site of Belgium's Nuclear Research Centre. Further tests flights are planned for later this year to prove a new, precise measurement technique.

Holtec International has completed the fabrication and delivery of the Centre Stack Casing for the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory's National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade, a precursor to commercial nuclear power based on nuclear fusion.

The project is a collaboration between Deep Isolation, the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre, the University of Sheffield and NAC International and aims to engineer canisters that meet UK regulatory requirements for long-term storage of used fuel and high-level waste in boreholes up to 3 kilometres underground.

Tokamak Energy is to build a prototype compact spherical tokamak, the ST80-HTS, at the UK Atomic Energy Authority's Culham Campus, near Oxford, England. The fusion device - with power plant-relevant magnet technology - will demonstrate multiple technologies required for the delivery of clean, sustainable fusion energy.

Nine South Korean organisations have signed a memorandum of understanding to cooperate on the development and demonstration of ships and offshore systems powered with small modular reactors. The partners will also develop marine systems and the production of hydrogen using molten salt reactors.

Materials with better resilience to the extreme conditions in fusion energy power plants are to be developed in a new partnership between the UK Atomic Energy Authority and the University of Birmingham. UKAEA will also sponsor a Chair in Fusion Materials at the University.