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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver 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
INL’s new innovation incubator could link start-ups with an industry sponsor
Idaho National Laboratory is looking for a sponsor to invest $5 million–$10 million in a privately funded innovation incubator to support seed-stage start-ups working in nuclear energy, integrated energy systems, cybersecurity, or advanced materials. For their investment, the sponsor gets access to what INL calls “a turnkey source of cutting-edge American innovation.” Not only are technologies supported by the program “substantially de-risked” by going through technical review and development at a national laboratory, but the arrangement “adds credibility, goodwill, and visibility to the private sector sponsor’s investments,” according to INL.
Michael D. Zentner, George Pomeroy, Robert A. Bari, Giacomo G. M. Cojazzi, Eckhart Haas, Thomas Killeen, P. Peterson, Jeremy J. Whitlock, Edward F. Wonder
Nuclear Technology | Volume 179 | Number 1 | July 2012 | Pages 106-111
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Safeguards / Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A14071
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Proliferation resistance (PR) evaluations of nuclear energy systems provide a structured approach for assessing the value of both intrinsic and extrinsic barriers to proliferation. Ultimately, PR studies allow an evaluation of proposed safeguards, an identification of potential weaknesses or alternative safeguard approaches, and a basis for improving and enhancing safeguards. To facilitate understanding and sharing of results, PR evaluations should be carried out following a standardized approach that has international acceptance and that provides consistent results independent of the analysts carrying out the evaluation. Proliferation assessment methodologies such as those being developed under the Generation IV International Forum (GIF) and IAEA's International Project on Innovative Nuclear Reactors and Fuel Cycles (INPRO) provide the technical platforms for supporting overall evaluations, but their findings are unlikely to be directly used by decision makers. This situation arises because although all PR evaluation approaches develop valuable information about the proliferation resistance of a nuclear energy system, a significant effort is still required to make results of PR evaluations usable and understandable to decision makers. This paper identifies a reference set of decision makers and other users who could be informed by the results of PR assessments. Whether the INPRO, GIF, or another methodology is used, the need for useful information about the PR of their systems must be met. The paper examines the information needs of different classes of decision makers and presents ideas on how the results of the various PR studies can be interpreted and presented to them in a more usable, understandable fashion.