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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Latest News
IAEA again raises global nuclear power projections
Noting recent momentum behind nuclear power, the International Atomic Energy Agency has revised up its projections for the expansion of nuclear power, estimating that global nuclear operational capacity will more than double by 2050—reaching 2.6 times the 2024 level—with small modular reactors expected to play a pivotal role in this high-case scenario.
IAEA director general Rafael Mariano Grossi announced the new projections, contained in the annual report Energy, Electricity, and Nuclear Power Estimates for the Period up to 2050 at the 69th IAEA General Conference in Vienna.
In the report’s high-case scenario, nuclear electrical generating capacity is projected to increase to from 377 GW at the end of 2024 to 992 GW by 2050. In a low-case scenario, capacity rises 50 percent, compared with 2024, to 561 GW. SMRs are projected to account for 24 percent of the new capacity added in the high case and for 5 percent in the low case.
William C. Gough, George H. Miley
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 501-506
Experimental Facilities and Nonelectric Applications | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8952
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
There are two interrelated requirements for achieving a sustainable modern world: 1) the availability of clean energy sources, and 2) the ability to close the materials cycle from use to reuse. Nature has always operated on a closed cycle process powered by solar energy. After the industrial revolution humans increasingly embarked upon an open cycle process extracting resources from the earth, dispersing them, and depositing the wastes into the earth's life support systems of air, water, and soil. Fusion energy has unique capabilities for addressing the root cause of the resulting energy-environment-economy dilemma that our planet now faces. We propose an industrial evolutionary path for solving the dilemma based on the hydrogen-boron (p-11B) fusion fuel cycle and the application of ultra-high temperature plasmas (fusion plasmas) for materials recycling. This concept is known as the Fusion Torch and would return waste material back to its original 92 elemental states. An Inertial Electrostatic Confinement fusion device is proposed due to its characteristic non-Maxwellian plasma which enables burning p-B11.