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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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October 2025
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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.
Kazuya Furuichi, Kazunari Katayama, Hiroyuki Date, Toshiharu Takeishi, Satoshi Fukada
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 2 | September 2015 | Pages 458-464
Technical Note | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-969
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this study, tritiated water was poured in a packed bed of natural soil and subsequently distilled water was poured in the bed to recover tritium retained in the soil at room temperature. From tritium balance, 22.5 % (7.1 MBq) of input tritium (31.5 MBq) was retained in the soil bed. By distilled water purge, 70 % (5 MBq) of retained tritium was recovered but 30% (2.1MBq) was left. To recover residual tritium, the soil was immersed in distilled water for 531 days but the amount of tritium released to distilled water was slight (0.04 MBq). A part of the soil immersed in the water was taken out and heated up to 300°C under humid oxygen atmosphere. Tritium release terminated at about 50 hours. 11 % (0.23 MBq) of retained tritium was released. By heating to 1000°C, the release amount of tritium increased proportionally to the time and additional 4% (0.09 MBq) was released at 5 hours. The desorption rates of tritium in each process was quantified.
Tritium is quite slowly released from the natural soil exposed to tritiated water in water at room temperature. However, a long time heating by 1000°C would be required to try to recover all tritium from the contaminated soil positively, although tritium recovery was not completed in this work.