Poland’s Ministry of Climate and Environment has issued a Decision in Principle endorsing Rolls-Royce Small Modular Reactor (SMR) technology.

Rolls-Royce SMR and SGP Industria have welcomed the Decision in Principle issued by Poland’s Environment Minister, Paulina Hennig-Kloska, who has said she believes the investment would be in the public interest and in line with the country’s energy and climate policies.

Rolls-Royce SMR has issued a challenge to industry, calling for ideas around monitoring and data collection during the transport of modules used to construct its Small Modular Reactor (SMR).

A major collaboration between Nuclear Waste Services (NWS), Nuclear Restoration Services (NRS) and Nuclear Transport Solutions (NTS) to safely and efficiently manage, and permanently dispose of more than 1,000 drums of waste, has completed earlier than expected.

The innovative project was an accumulation of eight years’ work and has seen eleven consignments, of low level radioactive waste, transported by rail from the NRS site at Winfrith, Dorset, to the Low Level Waste Repository in Cumbria for final disposal.

Over 2,100 tonnes of solid radioactive waste – the equivalent weight of 153 Big Ben bells - have been retrieved and safely stored at Hunterston A.

Hunterston A nuclear decommissioning site holds the largest inventory of solid ILW across all the NRS sites. This waste consists of contaminated metallic components, debris removed from spent fuel elements and 30,000 fuel element graphite sleeves from when the site was generating low carbon electricity 1964 – 1999.

A programme of work is underway at Torness power station bringing a boost to the East Lothian economy.

One of the station’s two units (Unit 1) has been taken offline for a major maintenance programme called a statutory outage.  This planned 10 week outage is like an MOT for the unit, allowing work to be carried out that cannot take place while the reactor is at power.

Two projects featuring nuclear energy are among 11 international space projects selected to receive funding from the UK Space Agency. Rolls-Royce's collaboration with BWXT receives GBP1.18 million (USD1.5 million) to further its work on fission nuclear systems for space power missions, while an international project led by the University of Leicester receives GBP800,000.