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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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
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.
Shinji Ebara, Yasutaka Harai, Takehiko Yokomine, Akihiko Shimizu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 148-152
Tritium, Safety, and Environment | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8892
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In solid breeder blanket design of fusion power plants, the ceramic breeder pebble bed plays a very important role. Its mechanical and thermal properties are necessary to design the blanket. In this study, thermomechancal properties of the bed such as effective thermal conductivity and stress-strain relation are investigated by means of numerical simulation. A discrete element manner is adopted in the simulation in order to clarify the influence of the individual particle properties upon the bulk behavior. As a result, the thermo-mechanical properties of pebble bed were well re-created in a computational space by means of the numerical model used in this study.
