Fostering initiatives to reduce stocks and end the production and use of highly enriched uranium and plutonium
According to Orano, the 9th shipment of MOX fuel from France to Japan has left France on 6 September 2025 and is expected to arrive in Japan in November 2025. The ships that transfer the fuel are "Pacific Heron and Pacific Egret, the specialized ships belonging to British company PNTL."
The 8th shipment was completed in September 2022.
UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has been allocated £154 million in government funding to begin preparatory work for the plutonium disposal program.
The decision to immobilize UK-owned separated plutonium was announced in January 2025.
US Department of Energy added three companies to the list of enterprises that received a conditional commitment to receive HALEU from DoE sources. These are listed as
These companies join the five recipients identified in April 2025:
These commitments are part of the HALEU Allocation Process, which seeks to provide US companies with uranium enriched to up to 20% uranium-235. The document, dated 28 August 2025, refers to the previous commitments made by the US government.
The National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2024 (Section 3131(h)) directed DoE to "seek to make available" HALEU in the following quantities: 3 MT by September 30, 2024, an additional 8 MT by December 31, 2025, and an additional 10 MT by June 30, 2026.
The "Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies" Executive Order, issued in May 2025 further directed DoE "to release at least 20 metric tons of high-assay low-enriched uranium into a readily available fuel bank." This material, however, would have to be allocated "for private sector projects operating nuclear reactors ... at DOE sites."
The 2024 annual report of Russia's Federal Nuclear and Radiological Security Program contains data on spent fuel reprocessing at the RT-1 plant at Mayak.
The "irradiated standard uranium blocks" are fuel elements that were used in plutonium production reactors. BOR, SM, and MIR are research reactors.
The nominal capacity of the RT-1 plant is 400 tonnes of fuel a year. Historically, it has been reprocessing about 110-130 tonnes of fuel a year.
The document also shows that the cumulative total amount of reprocessed fuel in 2016-2024 was 993 tonnes.
In its 2024-2025 Annual Report, the UK's National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority gave the program "to site and construct a permanent geological disposal facility" for "higher activity radioactive waste" a RED rating (row 32 in this sheet). This rating means that as currently structured, the project is deemed unachievable. The report also estimates that the project could cost up to £54b.
In a letter to the acting administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Deputy Secretary of Energy raised concerns about the status of the program "to reestablish the capability to produce plutonium pits at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the Savannah River Site (SRS)."
The letter directs the Office of Enterprise Assessments "to conduct a special study of NNSA's leadership and management of the plutonium pit production mission and its associated projects at LANL and SRS."
The current goal of the program is to achieve the capability to produce 80 pits annually by 2030. Los Alamos is expected to be able to produce 30 pits a year. See details of the program in earlier posts: 2019 and 2020.
The DOE letter was published by the Los Alamos Study Group.
The Indian government informed the parliament that the commissioning of the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor will be delayed due to "first of a kind technological issues."
The PFBR project has been delayed for more than twenty years. In its March 2023 statement, the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) said that the commissioning was expected in 2024. In March 2024, DAE began loading fuel in the reactor's core.
In July 2024, India's Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) granted permission for the "First Approach to Criticality". However, in December 2024, the government pushed the commissioning date back to the end of 2025. And in April 2025, Department of Atomic Energy officials told the parliamentary standing committee on science and technology that the first criticality of the PFBR was expected to be achieved in March 2026 and the plant would be completed by September 2026.
General Matter, a company that is planning to build uranium enrichment facilities in the United States, has leased "a 100-acre parcel of federal land at the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant" from the Department of Energy. In addition to the land, "the lease provides General Matter with a minimum of 7,600 cylinders of existing uranium hexafluoride."
General Matter is one one the four companies selected by the Department of Energy to work on HALEU enrichment in October 2024.
The second reprocessing line at the Mining and Chemical Combine in Zheleznogorsk began operations in July 2025. The construction of the line, which is part of the Pilot Demonstration Center, was completed in November 2024. According to the current report, the line, once it reaches the full capacity, will be reprocessing 200 MT of spent fuel annually. (Image source: Rosatom documentary.)
Rosatom's subsidiary, TVEL, has produced the first batch of tenth-generation centrifuges. The centrifuges will be installed at one of Rosatom enrichment facilities.
This development is part of Rosatom's modernization program that began installing 9+-generation centrifuges at the Urals Electrochemical Combine in Novouralsk in 2018 and at the Zelenogorsk Electrochemical Plant in 2019.