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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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General Matter to build Kentucky enrichment plant under DOE lease
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced it has signed a lease with General Matter for the reuse of a 100-acre parcel of federal land at the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky for a new private-sector domestic uranium enrichment facility.
Henry Makowitz, James R. Powell, Richard Wiswall
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 78 | Number 4 | August 1981 | Pages 395-404
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE81-A21374
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new concept for the transmutation of fission products and transuranics is studied. This concept, termed HYPERFUSE, allows one inertial reactor to transmute objectionable fission products (137Cs and 90Sr) from a large number (e.g., ∼30) of light water fission reactors, while at the same time generating electric power from the HYPERFUSE plant at a reasonable net plant efficiency (e.g., ∼30%). The cost of transmutation should be relatively low compared to other fission waste transmutation concepts due to the high support rate (number of fission reactors per HYPERFUSE reactor) and the effective generation of power by the HYPERFUSE reactor. Although the HYPERFUSE concept offers the possibility of a very effective means for waste transmutation and significant reductions in both high-integrity waste storage (burial) time and long-term risk potential, hazards will be introduced by such a system due to chemical processing and handling of radioactive materials in the recovery, partitioning, and fabrication stages as well as process and accidental losses. Such process risks need to be quantified for both conventional and advanced, chemical, and isotopic separation methods in order to evaluate the overall advantages and disadvantages of such a system. A system such as HYPERFUSE, however, leads to a quantifiable set of near-term risks for the nuclear waste problem, and a possibility of the elimination of a need for long-term nuclear waste disposal over a time scale of 106 years.