Southeast Asia has been declared free of highly-enriched uranium following the completion of a collaborative project to downblend Indonesia's stock of HEU to low-enriched uranium.

Russia has developed a program for management of used nuclear fuel covering the period "2016-2018 and up to 2020" to replace the previous one, which has expired.

Urenco has today reported a net loss of €8.5 million ($9.6 million) as a result of adverse exchange rate movements and significant weakening of pound sterling in its financial results for the half year ending 30 June 2016. The net loss compares with a net gain in the same period of 2015 of €166 million.

A facility for separating uranium from used research reactor fuel at the US Department of Energy's Savannah River Site in South Carolina has restarted for the first time in five years. The extracted uranium will be used in new fuel for nuclear power plants.

Russia has reached two more milestones in its endeavour to close the nuclear fuel cycle. Mashinostroitelny Zavod (MSZ) - part of Russian nuclear fuel manufacturer TVEL - has completed acceptance tests of components for its ETVS-14 and ETVS-15 experimental fuel assemblies with mixed nitride fuel for the BREST and BN fast neutron reactors. MSZ has also announced the start of research and development work on the technical design of the "absorbent element" of the core of the BREST-OD-300 reactor.

Brazil's fuel cycle company INB has celebrated the successful underwater repair of a damaged fuel rod canister in the storage pool of Angra 2.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has outlined corrective actions to be completed before Westinghouse's nuclear fuel fabrication facility in Columbia, South Carolina can resume some of its uranium processing operations following the discovery of a build-up of uranium in a plant component.

The municipal government of Lianyungang in China's Jiangsu province has announced the suspension of site selection work for a planned Sino-French nuclear fuel reprocessing project. The move follows public protests against the project.

Imagining a future energy policy in the event of "blackouts that occurred across Europe in 2018", Jonathan Hart and Brett Longstaffe propose a pan-European nuclear fuel cycle that emerged "out of the necessity for secure, low carbon electricity supplies". In their Spark! Contest winning essay*, the two young engineers write that this new system "stood on three pillars" - a coordinated European strategy , technological developments and a new nuclear message.

Most of the fuel that melted in unit 2 of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan remains within the reactor pressure vessel, an examination using a muon detection system indicates.

Russia has started pilot testing of its new type of nuclear fuel, REMIX, at unit 3 of the Balakovo nuclear power plant. Rosenergoatom said on 1 July the unit is being loaded with a number of fuel elements containing the fuel, and that the use of REMIX "will increase the efficiency of uranium use in the nuclear industry".

Areva has announced a number of contracts in the nuclear fuel cycle. The contracts relate to used fuel management at a Belgian research reactor, a Romanian waste repository and the supply of used fuel storage canisters in the USA.