ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
Latest Magazine Issues
Aug 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
October 2026
Nuclear Technology
September 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
August 2026
Latest News
A closer look at the initial NLIC selections—Part 2
In January, the Department of Energy announced its new Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus (NLIC) program, inviting states via a request for information to express their interest in hosting a facility supporting work from the front to the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle.
By April, 26 states had expressed interest in hosting such a facility. At the end of July, the DOE signed memorandums of understanding with five states—Idaho, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Utah—to more closely explore the possibilities of state-federal partnerships. These MOUs are not firm commitments from either the federal or state governments. Time will tell which—if any—of the five states develop projects through the program. In the meantime, today, we are taking a close look at what Utah, Idaho, Tennessee can offer in terms of a preexisting nuclear sector that could support new fuel cycle developments.
G. L. Jackson, V. S. Chan, R. D. Stambaugh
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 1 | July 2013 | Pages 8-12
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A17042
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The tritium burnup fraction fburnup can strongly affect the design of a fusion reactor since it influences the size of the tritium reprocessing plant, the on-site tritium inventory, and hence, the licensing requirements and cost of the entire plant. In this paper a simple analytic expression for fburnup is derived and then applied to typical parameters proposed for three possible fusion devices: ARIES-AT, FDF, and ITER. We find that for these parameters the burnup fraction is most strongly affected by the global recycling coefficient (through the global replacement time) and the fueling efficiency. The latter term may be the most easily influenced by plant design, such as by high-field-side pellet injection, for example. Because of the hotter edge plasmas in these devices compared to present-day tokamaks, the recycling coefficient will be lower, reducing the tritium burnup fraction. While this may not adversely affect ITER, which is limited to 400-s pulses for the inductive scenario, the tritium reprocessing for nearly continuous operation of devices such as ARIES-AT must be carefully considered in the overall plant design.