Major civil construction work has been completed for an underground dry used fuel storage facility at Ameren's Callaway nuclear power plant in Missouri. The first canisters containing used fuel are scheduled to be put in place in July, Holtec International said.

Some $73 million will be spent on "mutually beneficial and critical projects" in New Mexico by the US Department of Energy and its contractors under an agreement reached with the New Mexico Environment Department. The investments will be in lieu of proposed fines for two incidents at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in February 2014.

Holtec International and Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance have announced plans for a consolidated interim used nuclear fuel storage facility in south-eastern New Mexico.

Westinghouse is to increase the capacity of the cooling system at Sweden's central interim storage facility for used nuclear fuel (Clab) at Oskarshamn under a contract signed with with the country's radioactive waste management company, Svensk Kärnbränslehantering AB (SKB).

Miniature submarines are being used to recover cobalt cartridges dating back to the 1950s from storage ponds at the UK's Sellafield site. The cartridges were used for producing isotopes for medical and industrial applications.

The radiological event at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico in February 2014 resulted from shortcomings within both contractor and federal processes, the accident investigation board has concluded. The release, it said, was preventable.

Russia's national operator for radioactive waste management (NO RAO) has completed the design documents for an underground research laboratory to study the feasibility of final disposal of solid high-level radioactive waste (HLW) and solid medium-level long-lived wastes in the Nizhnekansky granitoid rock massif in Zheleznogorsk. The waste would be stored at a depth of 450-525 m.

Posiva, the Finnish waste management company, said today it has started construction of a heavy plug for the demonstration repository tunnel at its final repository and waste encapsulation plant at Olkiluoto. The underground characterisation facility is known as Onkalo.

Westinghouse and German construction company Hochtief AG have teamed up to offer decommissioning, decontamination and remediation services for Germany's nuclear power plants.

The UK's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has published its latest business plan, setting out its anticipated income and expenditure during the next financial year. It also includes a high-level 20-year overview of objectives it is working towards, and takes a more detailed look at key activities over the next three years.

The contents of a failed waste barrel at the WIPP underground disposal site were "chemically incompatible", said the Department of Energy's technical report today, with a certain brand of cat litter playing a major role in the incident.

A new Department of Energy initiative on radioactive waste disposal could "finally bring some progress the nation's long-neglected nuclear waste management policy," said Marv Fertel, the head of US trade body the Nuclear Energy Institute.