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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Fusion Science and Technology
October 2025
Latest News
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.
S. Welte, E. Fanghänel, S. Fischer, F. Kramer, T. L. Le, M. Sturm, N. Tuchscherer
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 3 | April 2017 | Pages 316-320
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1291233
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the main tasks of the Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe (TLK) is the operation of the Windowless Gaseous Tritium Source (WGTS) of the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment, which will perform an absolute measurement of the neutrino mass with a sensitivity of 200 meV/c2 (90% confidence level). While the Inner Loop system of KATRIN provides a stabilized tritium throughput of 40 g day−1 in the WGTS, the outer loop is required for tritium clean-up, purification, and accountancy.
The ability of the outer loop to supply tritium has been investigated using feed gas samples of different compositions. This paper will describe the gas processing tests which were done with batches of approximately 1 mol of tritium each and 20 mol in total, processed on a day-to-day basis in the TLK tritium loop. It is shown, that an isotopic tritium purity of > 98% can reliably supplied to the KATRIN experiment. This is sufficient to maintain the required isotopic tritium purity of > 95% in the KATRIN inner loop.
