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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Sep 2025
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Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
October 2025
Latest News
Shifting the paradigm of supply chain
Chad Wolf
When I began my nuclear career, I was coached up in the nuclear energy culture of the day to “run silent, run deep,” a mindset rooted in the U.S. Navy’s submarine philosophy. That was the norm—until Fukushima.
The nuclear renaissance that many had envisioned hit a wall. The focus shifted from expansion to survival. Many utility communications efforts pivoted from silence to broadcast, showcasing nuclear energy’s elegance and reliability. Nevertheless, despite being clean baseload 24/7 power that delivered a 90 percent capacity factor or higher, nuclear energy was painted as risky and expensive (alongside energy policies and incentives that favored renewables).
Economics became a driving force threatening to shutter nuclear power. The Delivering the Nuclear Promise initiative launched in 2015 challenged the industry to sustain high performance yet cut costs by up to 30 percent.
Jacob Keese, D. Keith Hollingsworth
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 1 | January 2024 | Pages 165-179
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2216989
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A more advanced form of nuclear propulsion known as centrifugal nuclear thermal propulsion (CNTP) promises increased propellant temperatures that could lead to a high specific impulse in the range of 1500 to 1800 s with hydrogen. This design has the potential of opening opportunities to perform missions to destinations much farther than currently possible. However, the CNTP concept poses many engineering challenges due to the nuclear fuel operating at high temperature in a liquid phase. A one-dimensional, steady-state thermal model of the liquid uranium fuel has been constructed to understand the limitations of this concept and the potential design considerations. Three related basic designs are considered, and key design parameters are varied in order to predict the temperature levels and void fractions across the liquid uranium pool.
