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Diversification and the common ground
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
Who would have thought, just a few years ago, that we would see so many long-standing barriers to new nuclear development falling like dominoes? Public opinion, policy, regulatory reform, finance and investment, design maturity, nuclear fuel enrichment, and fuel fabrication capacity have all advanced with remarkable speed in the United States.
Conventional wisdom holds that the most effective way to scale up the nuclear supply chain is to do so strategically, matching investments to the needs of reactor developers.
Suo-Yi Xiang, Huai-Fang Zhou, Jian-Wen Huo, Hua Zhang, Shi-Jing Zhang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 200 | Number 10 | October 2026 | Pages 2302-2320
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2575538
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In emergency scenarios such as nuclear radiation accidents, mobile robots are often deployed for tasks including detection, search and rescue, and environmental assessment. To mitigate radiation-induced damage to onboard components, the cumulative radiation dose is commonly incorporated as an optimization objective in path planning. However, the highly uncertain radiation field and the frequent emergence of unknown obstacles during such incidents pose significant challenges for traditional path planning methods, which struggle to generate optimal paths and implement efficient, reliable obstacle avoidance strategies. To address these issues, this study proposes a real-time path planning method for radiation environments [Real-Time A* algorithm with Dynamic Window Approach (RTAD)] based on an improved A* algorithm combined with the Dynamic Window Approach (DWA). The method jointly optimizes the cost function of the A* algorithm by integrating path length, cumulative radiation dose, and energy consumption, enhanced through a multiscale evaluation mechanism to improve planning accuracy. Additionally, the improved DWA algorithm incorporates a radiation-aware evaluation function, adaptive weight adjustment strategy, and speed variation penalty term, enabling effective real-time obstacle avoidance in complex nuclear radiation environments. Simulation results demonstrate that compared to the conventional A*-DWA approach, the proposed RTAD algorithm reduces cumulative radiation dose by approximately 23.1%, increases average movement speed by 28.6%, and decreases planning time by 23.4%.