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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
Meeting Spotlight
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
AI and productivity growth
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
This month’s issue of Nuclear News focuses on supply and demand. The “supply” part of the story highlights nuclear’s continued success in providing electricity to the grid more than 90 percent of the time, while the “demand” part explores the seemingly insatiable appetite of hyperscale data centers for steady, carbon-free energy.
Technically, we are in the second year of our AI epiphany, the collective realization that Big Tech’s energy demands are so large that they cannot be met without a historic build-out of new generation capacity. Yet the enormity of it all still seems hard to grasp.
or the better part of two decades, U.S. electricity demand has been flat. Sure, we’ve seen annual fluctuations that correlate with weather patterns and the overall domestic economic performance, but the gigawatt-hours of electricity America consumed in 2021 are almost identical to our 2007 numbers.
R. A. Krakowski
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 20 | Number 2 | September 1991 | Pages 121-143
Technical Paper | Fusion Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A29685
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Two decades of fusion reactor conceptual design have led to a clearer definition of an “attractive” fusion power plant. Recent advances in commercial reactor designs have pushed in the direction of smaller, more compact systems while stressing material and configurational choices that amplify safety and environmental (S&E) advantages (e.g., inherent or passive safety and significantly reduced long-term radioactive waste). When intelligently amalgamated, compactness and favorable S&E characteristics can enable fusion power to be competitive. The history of fusion reactor conceptual design, the constituents of an attractive fusion end product, and recent progress infusion reactor studies as embodied in the TITAN reversed-field pinch and the more recent and ongoing Advanced Reactor Innovations and Evaluation Study (ARIES) advanced tokamak reactor designs, are reviewed. The future for magnetic fusion energy can be bright if the right physics, technology, and materials research and development (R&D) choices are made now. An important ingredient in this “right choice” is design simplification and subsystem combination to achieve requisite levels of reliability and ease of maintenance, while ensuring competitive energy costs and acceptable S&E features. Significant departures from the “conventional” (i.e., the current R&D direction) tokamak physics embodiment are required to achieve these goals.