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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
The journey of the U.S. fuel cycle
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
While most big journeys begin with a clear objective, they rarely start with an exact knowledge of the route. When commissioning the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson didn’t provide specific “turn right at the big mountain” directions to the Corps of Discovery. He gave goal-oriented instructions: explore the Missouri River, find its source, search for a transcontinental water route to the Pacific, and build scientific and cultural knowledge along the way.
Jefferson left it up to Lewis and Clark to turn his broad, geopolitically motivated guidance into gritty reality.
Similarly, U.S. nuclear policy has begun a journey toward closing the U.S. nuclear fuel cycle. There is a clear signal of support for recycling from the Trump administration, along with growing bipartisan excitement in Congress. Yet the precise path remains unclear.
D. J. Alexander, J. C. Cooley, B. J. Cameron, L. B. Dauelsberg, R. M. Dickerson, R. E. Hackenberg, M. E. Mauro, A. Nobile, Jr., P. A. Papin, G. Rivera
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 4 | May 2006 | Pages 796-801
Technical Paper | Target Fabrication | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1203
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Work is underway at Los Alamos National Laboratory to fabricate machined-and-bonded target capsules of Be-6 wt% Cu for the National Ignition Facility. Significant progress has been made in producing material with the desired composition, purity, and homogeneity of composition, by arc melting. This material is thermomechanically processed by equal channel angular extrusion, to break down the coarse ascast structure and refine the grain size, to about 20 m. Machining with diamond tooling results in a significant improvement of the as-machined roughness, that also results in improved bond strengths. Bonding with a sputtered layer of Al can achieve high strengths with a bond 1.2 m thick, and thinner bonds are being investigated. Laser-drilled holes and fill-tube counterbores produced by electrodischarge machining appear to be feasible, but will require improvements in specimen positioning.