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A trip abroad
Hash Hashemian president@ans.org
In my August column in Nuclear News, I reflected on the importance of ANS’s annual conferences for bringing together our nuclear community at the national level. In September, after speaking at Tennessee’s Nuclear Opportunities Workshop, I focused my NN column that month on the value of state-level conferences.
Also in September, alongside ANS Executive Director/CEO Craig Piercy, I shifted my focus to another key front in nuclear collaboration, the international stage, by attending the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
The timing of the IAEA’s General Conference could not have been better; it took place the same week the U.S. and U.K. kicked off a new wave of transatlantic partnerships in the nuclear sector between both government and industry. This fortuitous overlapping gave us a timely and concrete reminder of international collaboration’s unparalleled benefits.
The General Conference was an expectedly busy event. To cover as much ground as possible, Piercy and I took turns attending either the U.S. delegation meetings with other countries or the General Assembly of the IAEA, where the American Nuclear Society has a seat among other critical nongovernmental organizations.
We listened to presentations by several of the 180 IAEA member states, including, of course, the United States. Aside from ANS, the U.S. presence at the conference included U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, NRC Chair David Wright, and DOE Assistant Secretary of Nuclear Energy Ted Garrish.
U.S. representation was further bolstered by an industry delegation that included 65 participants from 32 companies, many of whom used the opportunity to report progress on their plans for the international expansion of their nuclear fleets. Meetings of that industry delegation were coordinated by the Nuclear Energy Institute.
Aside from the main conference, Piercy and I also attended the embedded meetings of the International Nuclear Society Council. INSC exists to facilitate knowledge-sharing and collaboration between 18 different member nuclear societies from around the world.
The INSC meetings within the General Conference brought together the presidents and senior members of those societies to give presentations and explore new opportunities. I made a presentation on the state of nuclear in North America, covering the latest developments and deployments in the U.S. and Canada.
This presentation emphasized the new nuclear lift in the U.S. that is being heavily supported by the Trump administration. I recapped the four executive orders issued by President Trump in May, the recent momentum at the DOE, and how these changes are capitalizing on a broader groundswell in both industry development and public support.
I also pointed out the success of our neighbor Canada in progressing on the first water-cooled small modular reactor in North America using BWRX-300 technology, which was supplied by an American firm and international partners—a perfect symbol of the value of global nuclear collaboration.
In all, I have now represented ANS at the state, national, and international levels, gaining useful insight into the work that needs to be done at each. From this vantage point, it’s clear to me that the path forward from the country to the globe is to, above all else, keep working together and supporting each other to bring about the next age of nuclear.
Fawzy Hammad Sallam, Eman Mohamed Ibrahim, Sayed Fahmy Hassan, A. Omar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 11 | November 2022 | Pages 1666-1680
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2072650
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The shielding characteristics of natural bentonite can be enhanced based on calcination and ball-milling processes for protection against gamma radiation. The calcination process increases the content of the oxide, which enhances the mass attenuation coefficient; however, the elimination of water and organic matter from bentonite clay structures increases the particle size, where large particle size has a negative effect on this mass attenuation coefficient. Therefore, the calcinated bentonite has been ball-milled to reduce the particle size and improve the attenuation properties of natural bentonite. Furthermore, the calcination process occurs at 700°C for 2 h because dehydration is completed above 500°C while dehydroxylation is observed at 700°C. Therefore, the shielding parameters have been determined for calcinated, ball-milled, pressed bentonite clay samples according to different gamma-ray energies (662, 1173, and 1332 keV), where the experimental setup is based on narrow beam transmission techniques with two sources (137Cs and 60Co). In addition, the particle size of bentonite clay has been characterized using X-ray diffraction patterns depending on two different methods: dynamic light scattering and Williamson-Hall size analyses. This study shows that the calcinated, ball-milled bentonite pressed at 150 bar has the highest linear and mass attenuation coefficients of μ = 0.13 cm−1 and μm = 0.082 cm2/gm, respectively. Moreover, the experimental and theoretical investigation of the mass attenuation coefficient is in good agreement.
