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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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NECX debut: Shaping the next era of energy
The sold-out inaugural Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX) got off to a roaring start in Atlanta, Ga., Tuesday morning with an opening plenary that was a live highlight reel discussing the latest industry achievements.
Starting with a lively promo video that left the audience amped up for Entergy’s CEO and NEI chair Drew Marsh, who welcomed everyone to the event, hosted jointly by the American Nuclear Society and the Nuclear Energy Institute. He spoke to a full house of more than 1,300 attendees, promising a blend of science, technology, policy, and advocacy centered around the future of nuclear energy.
Mark D. DeHart, Zain Karriem, Michael A. Pope
Nuclear Technology | Volume 201 | Number 3 | March 2018 | Pages 247-266
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1322451
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A conceptual low-enrichment uranium (LEU) fuel design has been developed for the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) at Idaho National Laboratory. The ATR is currently fueled with a high-enrichment fuel but is slated to be converted to LEU under programs led by the National Nuclear Security Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy. A conceptual LEU fuel design, the Enhanced LEU Fuel (ELF), has been developed assuming power peaking control through the use of variable fuel meat thicknesses and no use of burnable poison. In initial work, this design was shown to satisfy performance requirements for ATR operation. Following these design calculations, a safety analysis process was initiated to demonstrate that the ELF design would successfully meet safety limits for postulated accident conditions. Those calculations, performed using RELAP5 and ATR-SINDA, require physics analysis to provide spatial power distributions and kinetics parameters for various core operations configurations. This article describes the findings of the physics analysis and provides predictions for the behavior of a LEU-fueled version of ATR, and compares these to calculations of the performance of the current high-enrichment uranium fuel.