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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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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October 2025
Latest News
Shifting the paradigm of supply chain
Chad Wolf
When I began my nuclear career, I was coached up in the nuclear energy culture of the day to “run silent, run deep,” a mindset rooted in the U.S. Navy’s submarine philosophy. That was the norm—until Fukushima.
The nuclear renaissance that many had envisioned hit a wall. The focus shifted from expansion to survival. Many utility communications efforts pivoted from silence to broadcast, showcasing nuclear energy’s elegance and reliability. Nevertheless, despite being clean baseload 24/7 power that delivered a 90 percent capacity factor or higher, nuclear energy was painted as risky and expensive (alongside energy policies and incentives that favored renewables).
Economics became a driving force threatening to shutter nuclear power. The Delivering the Nuclear Promise initiative launched in 2015 challenged the industry to sustain high performance yet cut costs by up to 30 percent.
D. H. Berwald, J. J. Duderstadt
Nuclear Technology | Volume 42 | Number 1 | January 1979 | Pages 34-50
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT79-A32160
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A conceptual study of actinide waste partitioning and transmutation options has been performed. The goal was to identify an actinide burner system that could be expected to perform efficiently within the framework of a demonstrated controlled thermonuclear reactor technology. Reasonable extrapolations in technologies that could be expected to develop during the same time frame as the fusion driver itself are utilized. The laser fusion driven actinide waste burner (LDAB) system investigated uses partitioned fission power reactor generated actinide wastes dissolved in a molten tin alloy as feed material (or fuel). A novel fuel processing concept based on the high-temperature precipitation of “actinide-nitrides” from a liquid tin solution is proposed. This concept will allow for fission product removal to be performed entirely within the device at high burnup. No attempt has been made to optimize this system, but potential performance is impressive. The equilibrium LDAB design consumes 7.6 MT/yr of actinide waste. This corresponds to the waste output from 136 light water reactors [1000 MW(electric)]. The mean life of an actinide atom in the LDAB is only 4.5 yr, and actinides, once charged to the LDAB, might be reprocessed fewer times during irradiation than in previously proposed systems.
