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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Industry Update—October 2025
Here is a recap of recent industry happenings:
New international partnership to speed Xe-100 SMR deployment
X-energy, Amazon, Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power, and Doosan Enerbility have formed a strategic partnership to accelerate the deployment of X-energy’s Xe-100 small modular reactors and TRISO fuel in the United States to meet the power demands from data centers and AI. The partners will collaborate in reactor engineering design, supply-chain development, construction planning, investment strategies, long-term operations, and global opportunities for joint AI-nuclear deployment. The companies also plan to jointly mobilize as much as $50 billion in public and private investment to support advanced nuclear energy in the U.S.
Dennis Nikitaev, L. Dale Thomas
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 1 | December 2022 | Pages S96-S106
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.2021768
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Water, ammonia, and other volatiles that can be used for propellant have been found on the Moon, and the technology that will be used to extract them has been laboratory tested. One of the considered propulsion systems for a crewed mission to Mars is nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP). However, current reference missions consider hydrogen as the main propellant, which is technologically difficult to store. Electrolysis units are required to process the lunar water to separate it into oxygen and hydrogen, which is only 1/8 of the mass of water mined. Due to these challenges, a preliminary analysis of alternative propellant nuclear thermal propulsion (A-NTP) expander cycle engines was made. A-NTP engine models that produced 25 000 lbf of thrust, which is comparable to the baseline hydrogen NTP engines, were constructed in Simulink for preliminary analysis, which yielded an Isp of 320.4 s for water and 381.6 s for ammonia. Although this Isp is lower than the most efficient chemical engines, since water and ammonia are used directly and are stored as such, a propellant tank volume decrease of up to 76.1% for water and 69.5% for ammonia is possible. This will decrease the number of launches, given that the tanks are not fully tanked at time of launch and lunar resources are used to fill the tanks completely.