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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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Industry Update—May 2025
Here is a recap of industry happenings from the recent past:
TerraPower’s Natrium reactor advances on several fronts
TerraPower has continued making aggressive progress in several areas for its under-construction Natrium Reactor Demonstration Project since the beginning of the year. Natrium is an advanced 345-MWe reactor that has liquid sodium as a coolant, improved fuel utilization, enhanced safety features, and an integrated energy storage system, allowing for a brief power output boost to 500-MWe if needed for grid resiliency. The company broke ground for its first Natrium plant in 2024 near a retiring coal plant in Kemmerer, Wyo.
Dale J. Merchant
Nuclear Technology | Volume 87 | Number 4 | December 1989 | Pages 1099-1105
Late Paper | TMI-2: Decontamination and Waste Management / Nuclear Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT89-A27700
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
External and internal radiation exposures to workers involved in the Three Mile Island Unit 2 recovery effort are reviewed. The 1979 accident left the plant with several areas with radiation environments that would not allow personnel entries for more than a few minutes without reaching the federal radiation limits. The recovery necessitated many unique tasks never before attempted in the U.S. commercial nuclear industry. Total commitment to the as-low-as-reasonablyachievable principle has helped keep individual and collective exposures acceptably low while allowing the recovery to proceed expeditiously. Since the initial worker actions to stabilize the plant and assess accident damage during 1979, there have been no individual exposures to radiation in excess of regulatory limits. Every individual annual dose since 1980 has been <0.04 Sv (4 rem), and the average annual worker dose has been comparable with the U.S. industry average. The annual collective exposures have been increasing since the initial plant stabilization. The relatively low collective doses from 1980 to 1983 reflect the technical planning and engineering phase of the recovery while conducting initial decontamination and dose reduction measures. Preliminary reactor vessel preparations and actual defueling commenced in 1984 and 1985. The collective doses in 1986 and 1987 correspond to the full-scale defueling and decontamination activities. The actual cumulative occupational dose through August 1988 was ∼53 person-Sv (5300 person-rem), and it is anticipated that <70 person-Sv (7000 personrem) will have been expended for the recovery. These collective doses are within the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s original estimate of 30 to 80 person-Sv (3000 to 8000 person-rem) and compare to the average collective dose for commercial nuclear power plants in the United States over the same time period.