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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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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.
L. El-Guebaly, P. Wilson, D. Paige, the ARIES Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 440-444
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Experimental Devices and Advanced Designs | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A726
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As the safety assessment frequently requires knowledge of the activation parameters, we estimated the highest possible activity, decay heat, and waste disposal rating on the time scale after shutdown for the compact stellarator power plant ARIES-CS. We selected two widely different systems employing SiC/SiC composites and low-activation ferritic steel (FS) as structural materials. Our results show that components of both systems qualify as Class C low-level waste (LLW) at the end of a 100 y storage period following the decommissioning of the plant. The SiC blanket, vacuum vessel, and magnet offer very low waste disposal rating to the extent that a Class A LLW seems achievable for these components. On this last point, we discussed the split between the Class A and Class C wastes, emphasizing our motivation to lower the level of ARIES-CS radioactive waste.
