Monday, 27 July 2026

Russia's nuclear regulator Rostekhnadzor has issued site licences for the first two proposed units at the new Kola Nuclear Power Plant, according to World Nuclear News.

The chosen site sits about 10 kilometres south of the existing plant, on the shores of Lake Imandra in Russia's Murmansk Region, and meets the regulator's requirements, World Nuclear News reported.

Rosatom's eventual plan covers four new units at Kola II, built around the VVER-S, a 600 MWe water-cooled reactor still under development, with the first two scheduled for construction between 2027 and 2037, according to World Nuclear News.

Fuel cycle economics are part of the case for the design. Rosatom says that if the proposed VVER-S reactors can run on a full load of mixed oxide (MOX) fuel, its use of natural uranium will fall by 50%.

The replacement rationale is generational. The four existing Kola units are VVER-440 reactors rated at 411 MWe, connected to the grid between 1973 and 1984, and the new build is intended to take over from them, World Nuclear News reported.

Fusion developer Thea Energy has been selected for a USD 20 million award under the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E) SCALEUP program to expand its magnet manufacturing lines, according to a GlobeNewswire release.

The program, formally Seeding Critical Advances for Leading Energy technologies with Untapped Potential, sits within the US Department of Energy (DOE). Thea Energy said the money will back what it describes as the first domestic production line of modular high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets, alongside expanded test capabilities.

The magnets are planar shaping coils. Thea Energy said it will use approximately 300 of them in Eos, its first large-scale integrated stellarator system.

The federal award follows a USD 100 million Series B capital raise by the company, according to the same release.

Thea Energy spun out of Princeton University and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in 2022 to commercialize the stellarator. The stellarator is a magnetic confinement design that relies on shaped external coils rather than a large driven plasma current, which places the burden of performance on magnet geometry and manufacturing tolerance. Building roughly 300 coils to a repeatable specification is a production problem before it is a physics problem, which is what the SCALEUP money targets.

HTS magnet supply has become a constraint shared across privately funded fusion programs, since the same conductor and winding capacity serves multiple developers. A dedicated domestic line for modular HTS magnets addresses that bottleneck at the component level rather than the reactor level.

Bulgaria and the United States have declared a common commitment to the new nuclear capacity planned at Kozloduy, describing the project as a strategic priority in bilateral cooperation, according to World Nuclear News.

The declaration followed a meeting between the board of the Kozloduy new build company and representatives of the US embassy. World Nuclear News reported that the discussion centred on progress at units 7 and 8, the next stages of implementation, and the possibilities for financing from US export banks.

Both reactors are Westinghouse AP1000 designs. The target is for unit 7 to be operational in 2035, with unit 8 following in 2037, according to World Nuclear News.

Combined capacity of the pair would reach 2,300 MWe, exceeding the 1,760 MWe of the four closed units at the site, per the same report.

The embassy meeting came a week after Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev met representatives of Westinghouse, World Nuclear News reported.

Engineering work on the project is already contracted. Hyundai Engineering & Construction, Westinghouse and Kozloduy NPP-New Build signed an engineering contract for the new capacity in November 2024, according to World Nuclear News.