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2025 ANS Annual Conference
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Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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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.
E.U. Bashlakova, V.V. Ignatiev, S.V. Kirillov, V.M. Novikov, A.V. Puzirev
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 20 | Number 4 | December 1991 | Pages 620-626
Advanced Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A11946908
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In providing nuclear power plant safety the priority is currently given to reactor self-protection by means of inherent features and passive means. The problems of self-protection for molten-salt fuel reactor (MSR) and molten-salt cooled coated particle fuel graphite reactor (HTMSR) have been studied. The following ways to reach a high level of self-protection are investigated: a) high level of natural circulation (100% for MSR and 10% for HTMSR); b) integrated layout; c) minimization of reactivity changes during fuel burn-up; d) decrease of maximum operative temperature. Calculations of transient processes during heavy accidents without scram are presented. It is shown that maximum temperatures of the primary circuit materials do not reach critical values under such accidents. For the high hypothetical case with the damage of the reactor and guard vessels in MSR the fission products yield from the fuel salt into gas-phase of MSR containment is investigated.
