Saturday, 4 July 2026

A drone strike inflicted significant structural damage on a building at the new central used fuel storage facility inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said.

Grossi said the hit tore into part of the fuel reception building, which houses the IAEA safeguards office. Casks holding spent fuel sit just a few hundred metres away, and radiation readings across the site stayed normal, with no radioactive contamination detected.

Energoatom put the resulting fire at 40 square metres. The operator said crews localised and completely extinguished it, and that no personnel were hurt.

The Centralised Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage Facility was built to hold 16,530 used fuel assemblies at full capacity, split between 12,010 VVER-1000 assemblies and 4,520 VVER-440 assemblies. Contracts with USA-based Holtec International were signed in 2005, though work on site did not start until 2017.

The strike came as another nuclear site faced power problems. The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant lost offsite power for the 18th time since the war began. That outage ran 15 hours, one of its longest, forcing operators to run emergency diesel generators to cool the six shut down reactors until offsite power came back on Saturday morning.

Constellation won a US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) waiver on June 1 permitting it to shift 760 MW of capacity interconnection rights to the former Three Mile Island unit 1, the reactor slated to restart in 2027.

The rights are being moved from Eddystone, a six-unit dual-fuelled plant in Pennsylvania, under a waiver request Constellation lodged with FERC on March 31.

Eddystone 3 and 4, each rated 380 MW, were set to shut last year. Emergency orders from US Energy Secretary Chris Wright have kept the pair running past their retirement date to hold up grid reliability.

A draft environmental assessment and a draft finding of no significant impact went out for public comment from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on June 8, covering the proposed reauthorisation of power operations at the plant. That comment window stays open for 30 days and closes on July 8.

When the reactor shut in 2019, its renewed operating licence still ran until 2034. Constellation has asked the NRC to grant an exemption request and three licence amendment requests to allow power operations up to that expiry, and has said it will seek to extend running to 2054.

Orano has begun construction at its Zuuvch Ovoo uranium project in Mongolia, with a ceremony at the site marking the shift into the build phase. The mine is designed for a nominal output of about 2,500 tU per year across an estimated 30-year lifespan.

Construction is planned to run four years, using in-situ leach methods that dissolve uranium underground and pump the solution to the surface. The project is expected to create 1,600 direct and indirect jobs.

The investment agreement assigns more than 51% of the project's direct benefits to the Mongolian state. Orano and the Government of Mongolia signed that agreement in January 2025 to develop and operate the mine in the south-eastern Dornogovi province.

Mongolia held 144,600 tU of uranium resources as of 2023, ranking tenth worldwide, according to the World Nuclear Association. No uranium has been mined in the country since the mid-1990s, when work stopped at the Dornod mine.

Turkey's Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant has loaded 163 dummy fuel assemblies into its first unit, part of the commissioning process before live fuel enters the core. Turkey's Nuclear Regulatory Authority oversaw the loading of the fuel dummies.

Sergei Butckikh, chief executive of Akkuyu Nuclear, described the completed loading at Unit 1 as "a full rehearsal" for loading nuclear fuel.

Unit 1 is targeted to begin supplying Turkey's energy system during 2026. Nuclear fuel arrived at the site in April 2023.

Rosatom is building four VVER-1200 reactors at Akkuyu under a build-own-operate model. When completed, the 4,800 MWe plant is expected to meet about 10% of Turkey's electricity needs.

Beyond the four reactors, Turkey is developing plans for small modular reactors, aiming to add 5 GWe of capacity by 2050.