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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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
Wright officially sworn in for third term at the NRC
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently announced that David Wright, after being nominated by President Trump and confirmed by the Senate, was ceremonially sworn in as NRC chair on September 8.
This swearing in comes more than a month after Wright began his third term on the commission; he began leading as chair July 31. His term will conclude on June 30, 2030.
Kevin Skinner, Greg Housley, Colleen Shelton-Davis
Nuclear Technology | Volume 176 | Number 2 | November 2011 | Pages 296-308
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A13304
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Was the death of the Yucca Mountain repository the fate of a technical lemon or a political lemon? We must be careful not to let this debate lure us away from capitalizing on the fruits of the project. One such fruit is a system for safely sealing packages containing radioactive nuclear waste. In March 2009, Idaho National Laboratory (INL) successfully demonstrated the Waste Package Closure System (WPCS), a full-scale prototype system for closing waste packages (WPs) that were to be entombed in the now-abandoned Yucca Mountain repository. This paper describes the system and components, which INL designed and built, to weld the closure lids on the WPs, nondestructively examine the welds using four different techniques, repair the welds if necessary, mitigate crack-initiating stresses in the surfaces of the welds, evacuate and backfill the WPs with an inert gas, and perform all of these tasks remotely. As a nation, we now have a proven method for securely sealing nuclear WPs for long-term storage - regardless of whether the future destination for these WPs will be an underground repository. Additionally, many of the WPCS's features and concepts may benefit other remote nuclear applications.