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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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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Latest News
Senate EPW Committee to hold Nieh nomination hearing
Nieh
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold a nomination hearing Wednesday for Ho Nieh, President Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as commission at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Trump nominated Nieh on July 30 to serve as NRC commissioner the remainder of a term that will expire June 30, 2029, as Nuclear NewsWire previously reported.
Nieh has been vice president of regulatory affairs at Southern Nuclear since 2021, though since June 2024 he has been at the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations as a loaned executive.
A return to the NRC: If confirmed by the Senate, Nieh would be returning to the NRC after three previous stints totaling nearly 20 years.
A. Meli, S. Bassini, C. Ciantelli, A. Fiore, M. Angiolini, M. Tarantino
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 4 | April 2024 | Pages 758-771
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2257547
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The lead-cooled fast reactor (LFR) is one of the most promising Generation-IV nuclear designs currently under development in Europe, China, and the United States. LFRs can ensure enhanced performance and minimal waste production thanks to a closed fuel cycle, but they also have some issues that need to be addressed. One of the most critical is the long-term degradation process initiated in structural materials exposed to liquid Pb. The present state of the art has shown that commercial austenitic steels, such as American Iron and Steel Institute 316L and 15-15Ti can be adopted as structural materials in Pb environments up to 480°C, beyond which they start to experience the dissolution of constituting alloying elements (Ni, Cr, and Fe) if not protected by a coating or by surface modification.
In more recent years, a lot of research effort has been done in order to develop new coating technologies and new base materials for operation with liquid Pb at higher temperatures. Among the newest alloys, alumina-forming austenitic (AFA) steels have gained interest in the research community because of their promising corrosion resistance results even at temperatures of 600°C. In this framework, an experimental campaign has been run at the Research Center ENEA of Brasimone that aims to characterize the behavior of two different AFA steels (with low and high Ni content in their composition) in static Pb at 650°C and 750°C with a moderate low oxygen concentration (10−6 wt %). After exposure, the AFA steels were characterized from the point of view of the morphology and composition, and the results are presented and discussed here.