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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
October 2025
Latest News
Shifting the paradigm of supply chain
Chad Wolf
When I began my nuclear career, I was coached up in the nuclear energy culture of the day to “run silent, run deep,” a mindset rooted in the U.S. Navy’s submarine philosophy. That was the norm—until Fukushima.
The nuclear renaissance that many had envisioned hit a wall. The focus shifted from expansion to survival. Many utility communications efforts pivoted from silence to broadcast, showcasing nuclear energy’s elegance and reliability. Nevertheless, despite being clean baseload 24/7 power that delivered a 90 percent capacity factor or higher, nuclear energy was painted as risky and expensive (alongside energy policies and incentives that favored renewables).
Economics became a driving force threatening to shutter nuclear power. The Delivering the Nuclear Promise initiative launched in 2015 challenged the industry to sustain high performance yet cut costs by up to 30 percent.
S. Fukada et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 3 | October 2011 | Pages 1061-1064
Contamination and Waste | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12599
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An experimental study on tritium transfer in porous concrete materials for the tertiary tritium safety containment is performed to investigate; (i) how fast tritium is transferred through porous concrete walls coated with or without a hydrophobic paint, and (ii) how well the hydrophobic paint coating works as a film protecting against tritium migrating through concrete. The experiment is comparatively carried out using two types of cement-paste and mortar disks with or without two kinds of paints. The results obtained here are summarized as follows: (1) Tritium transfer can be correlated in terms of the effective tritium diffusivity of DT=1.2x10-11 m2/s in porous cement. (2) Adsorbed or condensed liquid HTO itself is transferred only through pores in cement, and no tritium transfer path is present in non-porous sand. (3) Rates of tritium sorption and dissolution in cement and mortar coated with an epoxy-resin paint is correlated in terms of the diffusivity through the paint film of DT=1.0x10-16 m2/s. (4) The epoxy paint works more effectively as an anti-tritium diffusion coating than the acrylic-silicon resin paint. (5) The hydrophobic property of the silicon resin paint is deteriorated with elongating the contact time with H2O.
