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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Latest News
ANS joins others in seeking to discuss SNF/HLW impasse
The American Nuclear Society joined seven other organizations to send a letter to Energy Secretary Christopher Wright on July 8, asking to meet with him to discuss “the restoration of a highly functioning program to meet DOE’s legal responsibility to manage and dispose of the nation’s commercial and legacy defense spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive waste (HLW).”
William C. Gough, George H. Miley
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 501-506
Experimental Facilities and Nonelectric Applications | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8952
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
There are two interrelated requirements for achieving a sustainable modern world: 1) the availability of clean energy sources, and 2) the ability to close the materials cycle from use to reuse. Nature has always operated on a closed cycle process powered by solar energy. After the industrial revolution humans increasingly embarked upon an open cycle process extracting resources from the earth, dispersing them, and depositing the wastes into the earth's life support systems of air, water, and soil. Fusion energy has unique capabilities for addressing the root cause of the resulting energy-environment-economy dilemma that our planet now faces. We propose an industrial evolutionary path for solving the dilemma based on the hydrogen-boron (p-11B) fusion fuel cycle and the application of ultra-high temperature plasmas (fusion plasmas) for materials recycling. This concept is known as the Fusion Torch and would return waste material back to its original 92 elemental states. An Inertial Electrostatic Confinement fusion device is proposed due to its characteristic non-Maxwellian plasma which enables burning p-B11.