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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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Fusion Science and Technology
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
Wenping Wang, Andrei Khodak, Irving Zatz, Alex Nagy, Peter Titus
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 8 | November 2019 | Pages 828-834
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1609822
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The absolute collimator currently in service at the DIII-D NB injection system has experienced localized melting and damage. As part of the DIII-D 210-deg beamline co-counter conversion, a new absolute collimator was needed, and the opportunity to resolve melting was found on the off-axis beamline configuration. The pulsed high heat flux and uneven distribution of the heat loads required the aperture surface to be axially extended to spread out and reduce the surface heat flux. Geometric sculpting of the absolute collimator aperture based on the baseline dimension was performed using ANSYS CFX software. The reshaped absolute collimator aperture surface reduces the impinged heat flux to below ~4 MW/m2. Two interchangeable inserts are designed to occupy the high heat flux region for mitigating the thermal-induced stresses. The design achieves the objective of 6-s pulse lengths with 10-min repetition rates using the original peripheral conduit cooling system in the new collimator with minor changes.
