There is disagreement between France's radioactive waste generators and the country's radioactive waste management agency on the cost of building and operating a national repository for the disposal of high- and intermediate-level waste. The French energy minister must now decide a 'reference cost'.

Westinghouse announced today that its Springfields nuclear fuel fabrication facility in the UK has "reached the requirements necessary" for manufacturing fuel assemblies for its Small Modular Reactor (SMR). Last year the company proposed a partnership with the UK government to deploy SMR technology.

Start up of unit 4 at the Ningde nuclear power plant in China's Fujian province moved a step closer with the completion of the loading all 157 fuel assemblies into the reactor's core.

A prototype fuel assembly for China's CAP1400 pressurized water reactor design has been produced at the Baotou fuel fabrication facility in Inner Mongolia. The fuel's performance will now be verified.

Russia's Techsnabexport (Tenex) has said that it expects the value of its exports this year to outstrip that of 2014 by $500 million. The Rosatom subsidiary's preliminary results for 2015 indicate that its revenue from the global market will be worth about $2.7 billion.

The application for construction of a used nuclear fuel encapsulation plant and repository in Sweden is now complete, the Land and Environment Court in Stockholm has decided. It will now publish the application and proceed with the review process.

KazAtomProm has signed cooperation agreements with Chinese companies, including one for the development of Kazakh uranium mines and the construction of a nuclear fuel plant in Kazakhstan.

The Hungarian Atomic Energy Authority has authorised the introduction of a 15-month fuel replacement interval at units 1-4 of the Paks nuclear power plant, the plant's owner MVM NPP Ltd announced on 8 December. The move licenses the switch to a new type of fuel assembly with an average enrichment of 4.7%.

The first batch of unused fuel for the Prototype Fast Reactor at the UK's Dounreay site has been transported to Sellafield as part of the site's defuelling program.

The first shipment of uranium from Canada under a five-year contract signed in April has arrived in India. It marks Cameco's first supply of uranium to India.

Areva Inc has signed a contract to manufacture fuel assemblies for NuScale Power LLC's small modular reactor (SMR) technology, the two companies announced yesterday. Mechanical and thermal hydraulic testing of these new fuel assemblies are underway as part of Oregon, USA-based NuScale's design certification application, which is planned for submission to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission in late 2016.

Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner led the official opening ceremony of the Pilcaniyeu uranium enrichment plant on 30 November.