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Thursday, August 13, 2026
So much solar: Digging into the list of every U.S. power plant that went online this year
Tuesday, August 11, 2026
SUN DAY Campaign: Wrap-up of News Story Excerpts (New Studies & Data on Sustainable Energy and Climate Change) for July 27-August 9, 2026
SUN DAY CAMPAIGN
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July 27-August 9, 2026
Note: News story excerpts provided below do not necessarily reflect the views of the SUN DAY Campaign or any of its respective members.
[decomm_wkg] bill for hubs takes Yucca off the table
Trump administration lays legislative groundwork for hubs, would take Yucca off table
Tuesday, August 4, 2026
Cost of four new Kudankulam reactors jumps 55% after Ukraine war delays
This is almost the same per kilowatt as Vogtle 3 and 4.
Cost of four new Kudankulam reactors jumps 55% after Ukraine war delays
The four reactors of 1 gigawatt each are now estimated to cost 1.38 trillion rupees ($14.4 billion), according to a written reply to parliament by Atomic Energy Minister Jitendra Singh on Wednesday.
Updated On Jul 30, 2026 at 03:02 PM IST
Study reveals massive quantities of undeclared uranium are exported from the DRC - College of Engineering - University of Wisconsin-Madison
Study reveals massive quantities of undeclared uranium are exported from the DRC
July 30, 2026
By: Adam Malecek
A study conducted by University of Wisconsin-Madison and Princeton University nuclear engineers has identified a major blind spot in nuclear accounting with global nuclear security implications.
According to the researchers, large quantities of uranium have been extracted, concentrated and exported from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) over the past 20 years. This uranium has traveled through the DRC’s cobalt supply chain without being declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Published in the journal Nature Communications on July 30, 2026, the research also uncovers significant environmental and health risks to miners and surrounding communities from discarded uranium in mining waste streams.
The researchers used country-wide mineralization and geochemical data, mine-level trade records and a chemical model of cobalt processing to quantify the amount of uranium that has been dug up in the DRC and exported in cobalt-hydroxide shipments or left behind in the environment.
They estimate that 2,000 to 5,000 tonnes—approximately 4.4 million to 11 million pounds—of natural uranium were exported from the DRC, embedded in cobalt-hydroxide shipments between 2000 and 2024—even though there was no officially reported uranium production in the DRC in decades.
Less than 10% of this material appears to have been publicly declared and placed under international safeguards, according to study co-author Sébastien Philippe, a nuclear security expert and assistant professor of nuclear engineering and engineering physics at UW-Madison.
“This quantity of undeclared uranium could be used to produce fissile material for roughly 600 to 1,500 nuclear weapons or fuel a standard light-water nuclear reactor for 10 to 25 years, so it’s quite a large amount,” says Philippe, a 2025 MacArthur Fellow. “And because this uranium is undeclared and not officially reported as being mined and extracted, it has no limitation placed on its end use. It could end up in a civilian nuclear energy program or in a military program, because nobody is going to ask where this uranium is going. It’s not on the books.”
Philippe says most of the shipments went to China, which is home to about 95% of the world’s cobalt refineries. During the process in which crude cobalt hydroxide is refined to produce cobalt metal, uranium must be removed—and becomes a highly valuable byproduct.
“Our scientific research doesn’t show this was done purposefully to get uranium out of the DRC,” says Philippe. “However, one of the things we’re concerned about is that the volumes of exported uranium we’ve quantified are beyond what is supposed to be declared to the IAEA, both by the DRC and China. So that’s an issue.”
The DRC’s Copperbelt is the world’s leading source of cobalt, a metal essential to the global energy transition. In recent years, surging demand from lithium-ion battery manufacturers, especially for electric vehicles, has driven a boom in cobalt mining in the DRC. In this region, uranium naturally co-occurs with cobalt ores. Due to its chemical composition, the mineral that cobalt comes from in the DRC is exceptionally good at getting other elements, such as uranium, to stick to it. And, unless deliberately removed, that uranium stays with the cobalt all the way though extraction, processing into cobalt hydroxide and being exported as an industrial raw material.
“In a lot of mining industries, when you’re targeting one specific element, there’s often other ones that come along with it,” says Ryan Manzuk, a research fellow in Philippe’s group at UW-Madison and at Princeton University, who is the paper’s first author. “So when companies are mining specifically for the cobalt mineral in this region, they’re also extracting relatively high quantities of uranium—more uranium than you would get in your average rock—because the uranium is hitching a ride on the cobalt. And when you’re mining cobalt ore near somewhere that used to be mined for uranium, which is the case in the DRC, you could have quite a lot of uranium associated with it.”
In addition, the researchers estimate that 1,000–4,000 tonnes of uranium were likely discarded to mine tailings, the waste stream from mining, in chemically mobile forms, posing environmental and health risks to miners and communities surrounding the mines.
Philippe and Manzuk say their findings point to an urgent need to address these risks. Important first steps include improved accounting of uranium extraction and shipment, systematic assay measurement of cobalt-hydroxide shipments and worker radiation monitoring. “Based on what we found, I think there needs to be an extensive national audit of mining in the DRC and new rules for separating uranium from the cobalt supply chain,” Philippe says. “There’s also a need for surveillance and monitoring mechanisms to ensure this is happening in an environmentally responsible way.”
Ultimately, preventing uranium exports requires refining cobalt to metal within the DRC, according to the researchers.
The project was built on an innovative partnership between scientists and investigative journalists working together on a public interest research investigation. Philippe and Manzuk collaborated with journalists and editors from Lighthouse Reports and the Financial Times. On July 30, 2026, the Financial Times published an in-depth investigation that expands on the findings reported in the accompanying Nature Communications paper through additional reporting, interviews and documentary evidence. Lighthouse Reports also published a behind-the-scenes account describing the methodology, collaborative process, original research and investigative techniques used throughout the project.
This research was supported by funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and from the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment at Princeton University.
Featured image caption: A satellite image of the DRC from the researchers’ study. Image courtesy of Ryan Manzuk.
US clears oldest nuclear plant site for four advanced SMR-300 reactors
Historic U.S. nuclear site eyes four SMR-300 reactors after 49 years of service
The proposed project could create about 4,000 construction jobs in New Jersey.
Trump wants to expand NPP maybe for profit. AP piece in LAT and OCR today
As Trump boosts nuclear power, regulators seek to eliminate a landmark radiation safety practice
OCR has the same AP story but they cut out the last 6 paragraphs. Trump wants the NRC to rexlax regulations regulating NPP. NYTimes today also has a story that the Trump family will profit in its investments with expansion of nuke power plants. What is needed to reduce costs is relaxing standards for radiation safety to the workers and to the public. They want to eliminate the requirement to have radiation exposure as low as paossible (ALARA= as low as reasonably achieveable) to setting a high point which should not be exceeded. No where do they discuss that biological effects are CUMULATIVE over time. The international standard is 2 REM/year and Trump wants it to be 5 REM/year.
rjohnson
By Jennifer McDermott
July 26, 2026 10:47 AM PT
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is proposing to eliminate a foundational safety principle that has for 50 years minimized the radiation people in the United States are exposed to and that has been adopted around the world.
Currently, facilities such as nuclear plants, hospitals or academic institutions that use radioactive materials must ensure radiation exposures are kept “as low as reasonably achievable” — the ALARA principle. The NRC proposal would abandon that philosophy while keeping a separate standard on maximum radiation exposure.
The two standards have worked together in radiation safety. Dose limits set the maximum amount of radiation the public and radiation workers can be exposed to, while ALARA kept radiation exposure as low as practical under those limits. Research shows radiation exposure increases a person’s chance of getting cancer, a risk that increases as the dose increases.
The dose limits are not changing. But the NRC, which regulates civilian nuclear energy technologies and radioactive materials, now wants to replace ALARA with a “graded approach” that includes several actions facilities must take depending on the potential dose of radiation to workers. More rigorous radiation protection measures would be required when approaching dose limits to ensure they aren’t exceeded.
This comes as President Trump attempts to quadruple domestic nuclear energy production because of surging electricity demand amid a data center and artificial intelligence boom. Reforming the NRC is one way Trump is trying to speed up nuclear reactor development. He instructed the federal agency in an executive order last year to “adopt science-based radiation limits.”
The Energy Department, which oversees national energy policies, has already stopped using ALARA. The NRC expects to finalize its radiation protection regulations in the coming months.
NRC Chairman Ho Nieh said the commission is not lowering the bar on safety.
“We’re just removing the ambiguity,” he said in a call with reporters. “But the standard for exposure to workers and the public, those are not changing. We’re just putting in place greater clarification.”
Nieh doesn’t expect major changes within the nation’s existing fleet of large, traditional reactors. But companies designing and building new, smaller reactors could move faster with a clearer picture of the radiation protection requirements, he said.
Could radiation doses creep higher?
The NRC said radiation exposure limits are set well below levels associated with health effects, and it expects remaining standards and industry practices to keep radiation doses far below the limits. There’s incentive to do so — it’s more expensive and time-consuming to work in areas with higher radiation because access must be restricted and more surveys are required.
The nuclear industry’s trade association agrees with the NRC.
“We will always continue to look at what can we do to reduce the dose to workers, and maintain our doses to the off-site public as low as possible,” said Doug True, chief nuclear officer at the Nuclear Energy Institute. “It’s not like we’re just going to throw open the doors and let everything run up to the limits.”
ALARA created a “moving target” for regulation, said Justin Friedman, a nuclear energy consultant who previously spent three decades at the U.S. Department of State. Getting rid of the rule would allow NRC scientists to make more rational decisions about appropriate levels of manageable risk, he added.
Some experts question cutting ALARA
Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, cautions that some parts of the NRC proposal could raise permissible radiation doses in certain cases, while still staying below the cap. Lyman highlighted a proposed revision to radionuclide emissions standards, in particular.
Radiation exposure to the general public is limited to 100 millirem per year. A typical dose of radiation from a chest X-ray is 10 millirem.
The NRC wants to increase its radionuclide emissions standards from a conservative, 10 millirem per year dose to 25 millirem per year, based on a hypothetical person living in a house at the property line for a nuclear plant.
The NRC says actual doses to the public would remain far lower because, in reality, people live farther from nuclear sites and benefit from dispersion in air and water.
The NRC should improve, rather than eliminate, ALARA, Lyman said, to protect the public and workers. ALARA has become a political target because some people mistakenly believe radiation exposures have to be as low as possible no matter the cost, Lyman said. In reality, it allows trade-offs.
Katy Huff, a former U.S. assistant secretary for nuclear energy, said in some cases, the requirement may be challenging to regulate. Additional clarity would improve the regulatory environment without harming the public, added Huff, a professor and department chair at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
However, Huff said, she thought the NRC was going to clarify what “reasonably” means in ALARA without scrapping it. She said she’s open to being convinced the graded approach will be just as effective.
One expert sees a mixed bag
The National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, chartered by Congress to provide independent scientific guidance, has not formally weighed in yet. Council President Kathryn Higley said she likes some things in the 180-page document but thinks others are problematic.
The NRC should look at the whole picture for managing risk, she said. For instance, if a worker at a nuclear power plant were to enter an area where airborne radioactive materials are present, in keeping with ALARA, they might wear full personal protective equipment with respirators, said Higley, professor emeritus at Oregon State University. That makes them move slower, potentially subjecting them to heat stress that could hurt them more than a low dose of radioactivity, she said.
A concern with the proposal, Higley said, is that it maintains the current occupational dose limit for adult radiation workers at 5 rem, or 5,000 millirem, per year. With ALARA in place, the average dose to workers has been well below that cap.
The International Commission on Radiological Protection recommends an occupational dose of 2 rem per year on average. The NRC previously found it wasn’t justified to match that, because workers were exposed to less than that and changing regulations is costly.
Higley said the U.S. may need to align with the international community if ALARA is going away.
McDermott writes for the Associated Press
