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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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U.S. nuclear supply chain: Ready for liftoff
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
This month, September 8–11, the American Nuclear Society is teaming up with the Nuclear Energy Institute to host our first-ever Nuclear Energy Conference and Expo—NECX for short—in Atlanta. This new meeting combines ANS’s Utility Working Conference and NEI’s Nuclear Energy Assembly to form what NEI CEO Maria Korsnick and I hope will be the premier nuclear industry gathering in America.
We did this because after more than four decades of relative stagnation, the U.S. nuclear supply chain is finally entering a new era of dynamic growth. This resurgence is being driven by several powerful and increasingly durable forces: the explosive demand for electricity from artificial intelligence and data centers, an unprecedented wave of public and private acceptance of—and investment in—advanced nuclear technologies, and a strong market signal for reliable, on-demand power. Add the recent Trump administration executive orders on nuclear into the mix, and you have all the makings of an accelerant-rich business environment primed for rapid expansion.
Katsuyoshi Tatenuma, Yukio Hishinuma, Satoshi Tomatsuri, Kousaburo Ohashi, Yoshiharu Usui
Nuclear Technology | Volume 124 | Number 2 | November 1998 | Pages 147-164
Technical Paper | Decontamination/Decommissioning | doi.org/10.13182/NT98-A2915
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new gas-phase decontamination technology is developed based on gaseous reactions utilizing the volatile properties of the carbonyl and fluoric compounds of radioactive transition elements and actinides (corrosion products, fission products, and transuranium) on a material's surface. The feasibility of this new technology is determined by removing nonradioactive (Co, Cr, Ni, Re, Mo, Mn, Ru, and Zn) and radioactive (60Co, 63Ni, and 103Ru) nuclide transition elements as gaseous forms under high CO pressure (50 to 200 atm) and high temperature (~350°C). Experiments involving U and using fluoric gases are also performed. For radioactive nuclides existing in an oxide layer of stainless steel, pretreatment with supercritical CO2 + I2 + H2O is used to remove the oxide layer completely, and by the subsequent gaseous reaction, 95 to 99% of 60Co is removed from the layer by CO gas treatment at a pressure of 200 atm. The plasma treatment using fluorine gas results in U being removed with high efficiency (~60%) after only 5 min, even at a reduced pressure of 1 Torr and at room temperature. When the carbonyl and fluoric species generated from a nontoxic gas mixture (1 Torr) of CF4 and O2 is used, U and 60Co are removed simultaneously with high removal efficiencies of 80 and 100% for 60Co and U, respectively. The data provide evidence that chemically reactive plasma treatment is available as a gas-phase decontamination method that can be conducted using nontoxic gases under safe and mild conditions such as reduced pressure, shorter time periods, and ambient temperature. Finally, a fluoric chemical reaction can be used to remove solid U deposits by converting them to gaseous U compounds at room temperature and without using plasma treatment. The pressure of ClF3 gradually affects the higher removal efficiency of U, and the removal efficiency is >90% under the conditions of 30 min and >100 Torr. The results verify that chemical reactions involving carbonylation and fluorination reactions can be utilized for gas-phase decontamination, and the potential for this new idea for decontamination is affirmed.If gas-phase decontamination technology is further developed, it will be not only convenient but also economically advantageous because decontaminating and treating the large volume of nuclear wastes - especially nonincinerable radioactive wastes - are currently very difficult.
