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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Latest News
NNSA awards BWXT $1.5B defense fuels contract
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has awarded BWX Technologies a contract valued at $1.5 billion to build a Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment (DUECE) pilot plant in Tennessee in support of the administration’s efforts to build out a domestic supply of unobligated enriched uranium for defense-related nuclear fuel.
L. El-Guebaly, L. Cadwallader, W. Sowder, ARIES Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 751-759
Safety & Environment | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12475
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
At present, there are no regulatory guidelines to follow for US fusion power plant construction and operation. Thus far, the Department of Energy (DOE) has been regulating existing fusion experiments, following the 1996-1999 DOE Fusion Standards and using the spirit of the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) code. Considering this reality, a few options emerged for licensing ARIES-type power plants and the like. Developing new fusion-specific regulations stands out as the most logical option, but requires well-coordinated effort between DOE, regulatory agencies, and the fusion community with considerable funding and long lead-time. Nevertheless, a few recent developments seem promising: 1) The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) plans to assert regulatory jurisdiction over commercial fusion devices, and 2) the ongoing effort within ASME will develop rules for the construction of fusion-energy-related components. The most recent NRC, ASME and fusion licensing developments are reviewed in this paper. In addition, an interesting comparison with ITER was made to foresee how US fusion power plants could leverage from ITER.