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2026 Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
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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.
L. E. Herranz, F. Sánchez, S. Gupta
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 10 | October 2023 | Pages 1523-1536
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2122679
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The removal of aerosol particles and vapors in gas bubbles moving through a water pool is known to be an efficient means to reduce source term to the environment during severe accidents, as happened in Fukushima Daiichi. This trapping, called pool scrubbing, entails a complex phenomenology in which hydrodynamics, thermal hydraulics, and aerosol physics strongly affect each other and determine the net transfer of radioactivity coming out from the aqueous pond. More than 20 experimental programs have addressed this issue since the early 1980s, but few of them did it in a systematic and representative way. This paper thoroughly reviews the entire pool scrubbing database until 2016 and assesses the adequacy of the experimental setup, representativeness of boundary conditions, weaknesses in decontamination factor derivation, data uncertainties, and some other aspects to finally synthesize a reduced number of experiments that could be used as an experimental matrix for the validation of pool scrubbing models. More than 500 tests were reviewed and classified as Qualified for Validation, Useful for Understanding, or Not Useful; less than 15% of these experiments are considered in the proposed validation matrix due to different reasons. Major insights and remaining needs are also highlighted. This work was conducted under the framework of the Integration of Pool Scrubbing Research to Enhance Source-Term Calculations, or the IPRESCA project, led by Becker Technologies, in the framework of the Sustainable Nuclear Energy Technology Platform/Nuclear Generation II & III Alliance/Technical Area 2.
