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Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
TopFuel 2022 Light Water Reactor Fuel Performance Conference Plenary SPeaker
Ph.D. student
Nuclear Science and Engineering department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Assil Halimi is a Ph.D. student in the Nuclear Science and Engineering department at MIT. His research focuses on fuel performance, thermal hydraulics and reactor design and safety, currently he is involved in assessing high burnup fuels for LWRs. He graduated from the University of Lyon, France in Mathematics and Economics 18’ and holds an engineer’s degree (Dipl. Ing.) in Electrical Engineering 20’ from Institut National des Science Appliquées (INSA Lyon) and in Nuclear Engineering 19’ from Institut National des Sciences et Techniques Nucléaires (INSTN-CEA, Paris-Saclay). Before joining the graduate program at MIT, he worked as a Core Physics Engineer at Engie, the operator of the Belgian nuclear power plants. In the past, he interned at several organizations in Africa, Europe, and the U.S. working on various technology applications such as: electric propulsion (Safran Group), Oil and Gas distribution (Sonatrach Group), turbine maintenance (GE Power) and system-design platforms and education (National Instruments).
Last modified August 24, 2022, 9:42am EDT