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Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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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Latest News
Deep Isolation validates its disposal canister for TRISO spent fuel
Nuclear waste disposal technology company Deep Isolation announced it has successfully completed Project PUCK, a government-funded initiative to demonstrate the feasibility and potential commercial readiness of its Universal Canister System (UCS) to manage TRISO spent nuclear fuel.
N. W. Eidietis
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 7 | November 2021 | Pages 738-744
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1889919
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Disruptions present a great challenge to achieving an economically viable commercial tokamak fusion reactor. Disruption handling, including prevention, mitigation, and resilient design, must be incorporated into future reactor designs at the same priority as core performance and steady-state heat flux removal. Prevention requires avoiding unstable regimes; actively stabilizing instabilities if they do appear; or, if those steps should fail, terminating the plasma-controlled rampdown. Mitigation is a last resort that utilizes massive impurity injection to reduce a damaging concentration of thermal and mechanical loads. Extremely robust disruption prevention will be of paramount importance to ensure high duty factor and capital return on the reactor investment, but the reactor environment poses significant technical challenges exceeding those in ITER. The long-term mission of a commercial reactor motivates investment in passive resilient design to survive disruptions in the absence of active intervention.