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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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The newest era of workforce development at ANS
As most attendees of this year’s ANS Annual Conference left breakfast in the Grand Ballroom of the Chicago Downtown Marriott to sit in on presentations covering everything from career pathways in fusion to recently digitized archival nuclear films, 40 of them made their way to the hotel’s fifth floor to take part in the second offering of Nuclear 101, a newly designed certification course that seeks to give professionals who are in or adjacent to the industry an in-depth understanding of the essentials of nuclear energy and engineering from some of the field’s leading experts.
Braden Goddard, Aaron Totemeier
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 5 | May 2023 | Pages 696-706
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2145836
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The United States and the Russian Federation have agreed to dispose of their excess weapons-grade plutonium, with consuming the material as nuclear fuel in light water reactors for electricity generation often discussed as the best option. Lightbridge Corporation has several thermal reactor fuel designs that offer very high burnups, in the range of 21 at. % or approximately 190 900 MWd/tonne of heavy metal, which make them well suited for consuming excess weapons-grade plutonium. MCNP6.2 computer simulations were performed to quantify the mass of plutonium consumed in a Lightbridge-designed fuel rod compared to traditional mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel, as well as the attractiveness of the plutonium in the used fuel for weapons purposes. The results of these simulations show that the Lightbridge plutonium disposition fuel variant consumes approximately 5.5 times more plutonium per fuel rod than MOX fuel and that the material attractiveness of the Lightbridge-used plutonium is noticeably less than that of MOX fuel.