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2026 Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
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A trip abroad
Hash Hashemian president@ans.org
In my August column in Nuclear News, I reflected on the importance of ANS’s annual conferences for bringing together our nuclear community at the national level. In September, after speaking at Tennessee’s Nuclear Opportunities Workshop, I focused my NN column that month on the value of state-level conferences.
Also in September, alongside ANS Executive Director/CEO Craig Piercy, I shifted my focus to another key front in nuclear collaboration, the international stage, by attending the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
The timing of the IAEA’s General Conference could not have been better; it took place the same week the U.S. and U.K. kicked off a new wave of transatlantic partnerships in the nuclear sector between both government and industry. This fortuitous overlapping gave us a timely and concrete reminder of international collaboration’s unparalleled benefits.
The General Conference was an expectedly busy event. To cover as much ground as possible, Piercy and I took turns attending either the U.S. delegation meetings with other countries or the General Assembly of the IAEA, where the American Nuclear Society has a seat among other critical nongovernmental organizations.
We listened to presentations by several of the 180 IAEA member states, including, of course, the United States. Aside from ANS, the U.S. presence at the conference included U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, NRC Chair David Wright, and DOE Assistant Secretary of Nuclear Energy Ted Garrish.
U.S. representation was further bolstered by an industry delegation that included 65 participants from 32 companies, many of whom used the opportunity to report progress on their plans for the international expansion of their nuclear fleets. Meetings of that industry delegation were coordinated by the Nuclear Energy Institute.
Aside from the main conference, Piercy and I also attended the embedded meetings of the International Nuclear Society Council. INSC exists to facilitate knowledge-sharing and collaboration between 18 different member nuclear societies from around the world.
The INSC meetings within the General Conference brought together the presidents and senior members of those societies to give presentations and explore new opportunities. I made a presentation on the state of nuclear in North America, covering the latest developments and deployments in the U.S. and Canada.
This presentation emphasized the new nuclear lift in the U.S. that is being heavily supported by the Trump administration. I recapped the four executive orders issued by President Trump in May, the recent momentum at the DOE, and how these changes are capitalizing on a broader groundswell in both industry development and public support.
I also pointed out the success of our neighbor Canada in progressing on the first water-cooled small modular reactor in North America using BWRX-300 technology, which was supplied by an American firm and international partners—a perfect symbol of the value of global nuclear collaboration.
In all, I have now represented ANS at the state, national, and international levels, gaining useful insight into the work that needs to be done at each. From this vantage point, it’s clear to me that the path forward from the country to the globe is to, above all else, keep working together and supporting each other to bring about the next age of nuclear.
Patrick Achenbach, Mirco Christmann
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 1 | January 2024 | Pages 1-6
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2151301
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Light dark matter (LDM) in the mega-electron-volt to giga-electron-volt mass region is an attractive candidate for the all-pervasive and encompassing matter making up the vast bulk of the mass of our universe. Beam dump experiments at high-intensity accelerators are a powerful tool to produce and detect LDM. They can probe an unexplored dark sector that is interacting with the standard model (SM) through one or more portals. At the lowest-beam-energy end, the DarkMESA experiment will run behind the dump of the 150-MeV electron beam of the MESA accelerator, currently under construction at the Institute for Nuclear Physics in Mainz. The concept for detecting direct scattering reactions of LDM comprises an electromagnetic calorimeter surrounded by an active veto system for rejecting backgrounds from SM particles. Suitable shielding will be located between the downstream detectors and the dump. A low-pressure, negative-ion, time-projection chamber could supplement these searches. At much higher beam energies, the Beam Dump eXperiment (BDX) is proposed to run parasitically behind the Jefferson Lab Hall-A beam dump making use of the up to 11-GeV electron beam. BDX employs the same detector concept. Direct LDM scattering reactions can be detected in an electromagnetic calorimeter operated inside hermetic layers of veto counters and a thick lead vault. Both experiments can explore uncovered regions of the parameter space of the LDM interaction strength versus mass, exceeding the discovery potential of existing experiments.
