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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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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.
William Ziehm, L. Dale Thomas
Nuclear Technology | Volume 211 | Number 1 | April 2025 | Pages S12-S20
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2024.2323242
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Missions to the Kuiper belt have previously been carried out only as flybys and with very small payloads. Investigating launch windows for Kuiper belt missions supported by centrifugal nuclear thermal propulsion (CNTP) contributes to defining its operational use case. Results indicate that CNTP enables rendezvous missions to the Kuiper belt, both with direct transfer trajectories or planetary gravity assist trajectories, although there are many challenges to making these mission architectures feasible. The direct trajectories have transfer times of roughly 14 to 16 years while combining CNTP with gravity assists from Jupiter could lower transfer time to as low as 10 to 12 years to Kuiper belt objects such as Pluto and Quaoar. These missions are then shown to inform the architecture of the CNTP injection stage vehicle, which can be supported by heavy and super-heavy commercial launch vehicles with a single launch. Last, drawbacks of the mission and vehicle architectures are given that impose limits on the use case for CNTP on these missions.