International Isotopes has amended its project participation agreement with New Mexico's Lea County to reflect the delay in constructing its planned facility to deconvert depleted uranium hexafluoride.

The Swedish nuclear regulator has said it believes the country's radioactive waste management company can meet all the safety and radiation protection requirements for its planned repository for used nuclear fuel.

A proposal for the storage of waste generated from the reprocessing of German used nuclear fuel in France and the UK has been announced by the country's environment minister. The operators of Germany's nuclear power plants have welcomed the proposal.

A new fund set up by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) at the request of the European Commission will finance projects to rehabilitate former uranium mines and processing sites in Central Asia.

Russia and Norway plan to sign a protocol soon on early notification in the event of a nuclear accident, Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom said yesterday. The statement followed a meeting of the Russian-Norwegian commission on nuclear and radiation safety held in the Norwegian town of Kirkenes.

Belarus has adopted a radioactive waste management strategy for its first nuclear power plant under construction near Ostrovets. The country's council of ministers adopted a resolution outlining the strategy on 2 June. The document was published on the National Legal Internet Portal last week. The resolution entered into force after its official publication.

The nuclear expertise of Germany's Jülich Research Centre (Forschungszentrum Jülich) and the Experimental Reactor Consortium GmbH (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Versuchsreaktor, AVR) are to be combined into a new enterprise.

Areva Resources Canada and researchers at the University of Saskatchewan have completed a major study on the long-term condition of uranium mill tailings at the McClean Lake mill using the Canadian Light Source (CLS) synchrotron facility.

EOn and Vattenfall have signed an agreement to cooperate in the decommissioning and dismantling of their jointly owned nuclear power plants in Germany.

Some 11 tonnes of "breeder" material that had been in storage at the Dounreay site in Scotland has now been transported to the Sellafield site in northern England. A further 33 tonnes of breeder material remains within the Dounreay Fast Reactor and will be transported to Sellafield later.

Sellafield Limited has awarded a contract worth up to £50 million ($78 million) to Darchem Engineering Limited for stainless steel storage boxes to store historic radioactive waste retrieved from a silo at the UK's Sellafield site. It follows the award of a similar contract earlier this month to Metalcraft.

A test container that has been stored in a tunnel at the Grimsel underground laboratory in Switzerland for 18 years is being removed as the experiment is dismantled. The full-scale experiment set out to determine the effects of heat from high-level waste on the surrounding rock and backfill material.