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Nuclear Criticality Safety
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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Latest News
Take steps on SNF and HLW disposal
Matt Bowen
With a new administration and Congress, it is time once again to ponder what will happen—if anything—on U.S. spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste management policy over the next few years. One element of the forthcoming discussion seems clear: The executive and legislative branches are eager to talk about recycling commercial SNF. Whatever the merits of doing so, it does not obviate the need for one or more facilities for disposal of remaining long-lived radionuclides. For that reason, making progress on U.S. disposal capabilities remains urgent, lest the associated radionuclide inventories simply be left for future generations to deal with.
In March, Rick Perry, who was secretary of energy during President Trump’s first administration, observed that during his tenure at the Department of Energy it became clear to him that any plan to move SNF “required some practical consent of the receiving state and local community.”1
D. Hernández-Arriaga, D. M. Ventura-Ovalle, M. Nieto-Pérez
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 2 | February 2019 | Pages 148-159
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2018.1554390
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Using infrastructure from the old TPM-1 tokamak in Mexico, there is an ongoing project to bring it back into operation, but with important upgrades. One of the main planned improvements will be the substitution of the continuous winding used to generate the toroidal field (TF) with a set of discrete circular coils. The new toroidal magnetic field configuration should also allow stable operation of the machine at plasma currents of up to 50 kA for 30 ms. At this design stage, decisions regarding number and characteristics of the coils and power delivery strategy to them need to be addressed. In the present paper, a study regarding the parameters required for the generation of the adequate TF are presented, including the process for determining number of TF coils, their size and position, the required current pulse for operation, and a potential strategy for generating such pulse based on passive pulse-forming networks.
