Hosted by Waste Management Symposia, the annual Waste Management Conference is widely regarded as the premier international conference on the management of radioactive material and related topics. The theme of this year’s conference, being held February 26-March 3 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Arizona, is “Planning for the Future: Innovation, Transformation, Sustainability.” The featured country for 2023 is France, which will be represented by numerous panels, papers, posters, and exhibits demonstrating the country’s continuous innovation and pragmatism in the management of the nuclear fuel cycle. The featured Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management topic is “EM’s Transformation in Radioactive Liquid Tank Waste Management.”

Each year, the two best oral presentations/papers from the previous year’s conference are recognized. Honoring the highest-quality presentations, the American Nuclear Society and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers each present an award for best presentation/paper. The following are the abstracts for the best ANS and ASME papers of 2022. The full papers are available to 2023 WM Conference participants through the WM Symposia website, at wmsym.org.

The Nuclear Innovation Alliance (NIA) released a new report last week titled Transforming the U.S. Department of Energy: Paving the Way to Commercialize Advanced Nuclear Energy, which gives recommendations for how the Department of Energy (DOE) can help advanced nuclear power technologies cross the finish line to commercialization. It calls for a “whole-of-government and whole-of-society effort dependent on successful public-private partnerships.”

The NIA report acknowledges that boosting energy security and meeting decarbonization goals will require at least double the domestic nuclear energy capacity that is on line today. But the nuclear industry is highly complex, and its supply chain is atrophied. The success of advanced nuclear technology will depend on careful collaboration and planning to bolster a new supply chain.