Terrestrial Energy USA announced today it had informed the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission of its plans to license a small modular reactor in the USA. Terrestrial said it intends to start "pre-application interactions" with the regulator this year and to make its licensing application in late 2019.

NuScale Power has asked the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to approve the company's small modular reactor commercial power plant design. This is the first-ever SMR design certification application to be submitted to the NRC.

Physicists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the Joint Institute for High Temperatures of the Russian Academy of Sciences have described the mobility of line defects, or dislocations, in uranium dioxide. This, they announced this week, will enable future predictions of nuclear fuel behaviour under operating conditions.

The US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration has entered into follow-on cooperative agreements with three projects aimed at securing a domestic supply of molybdenum-99 without using highly enriched uranium. The latest funding completes the full $25 million NNSA contribution to each project.

Four Russian cities have expressed an interest in using small reactors to supply heat and power, according to Yuriy Kuznetsov of NA Dollezhal Research and Development Institute of Power Engineering (NIKIET). A Rosatom feasibility study has concluded that up to 38 cogeneration reactors could potentially be deployed at 14 sites for this purpose.

The University of Bristol, in England, has developed new technology that uses nuclear waste to generate electricity in a nuclear-powered battery. A team of physicists and chemists from the university has "grown a man-made diamond" that, when placed in a radioactive field, is able to generate a small electrical current. The developers say the innovation could solve some of the problems of nuclear waste, clean electricity generation and battery life.

Russia has started testing its new type of nuclear fuel, REMIX, at the MIR research reactor at the Research Institute of Atomic Reactors in Dimitrovgrad, which is in the Ulyanovsk region. Development of REMIX (from Regenerated Mixture) fuel is part of state nuclear corporation Rosatom's strategy to enable better use of recycled uranium and plutonium on an industrial scale in pressurized water reactors.

Institutional and cultural changes are needed if advanced nuclear reactor designs are to progress from development to deployment by 2030, the Global Nexus Initiative has said in a report to policymakers. The GNI has put forward ten policy recommendations to enable these changes.

Canadian reactor designer StarCore Nuclear has applied to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) to begin the vendor design review process for its Generation IV high temperature gas reactor (HTGR).

Canada's Bruce Power and Ontario Power Generation (OPG) have signed a memorandum of understanding to work together to ensure the continued long-term supply of cobalt-60 by expanding production to the Darlington and Bruce A plants.

The UK's Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has announced its commitment of £20 million ($25 million) for an initial phase of a new nuclear research and innovation program. This covers five major themes: advanced fuels; materials and manufacture; reactor design; advanced recycling; and strategic toolkit.

The Nuclear Research and Consultancy Group announced yesterday it has successfully demonstrated the capability to measure material expansion during irradiation with micrometer accuracy at temperatures above 750°C. The technology – developed at the High Flux Reactor at Petten in the Netherlands - will help in the development of improved reactor materials and nuclear fuels.