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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Latest News
Spent fuel transfer project completed at INL
Work crews at Idaho National Laboratory have transferred 40 spent nuclear fuel canisters into long-term storage vaults, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has reported.
Heiner Meldner
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 69 | Number 3 | March 1979 | Pages 438-441
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE79-A19963
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) pellet center burnup of fission reactor waste, namely, 14-MeV neutron fission of the very long-lived actinides that pose storage problems, is calculated for realistic target designs. A major advantage of pellet center burnup is safety: Only milligram quantities of highly toxic and active material need to be present in the fusion chamber, whereas blanket burnup reqUires the continued presence of tons of actinides in a small volume. One ICP plant can transmute the actinide waste of up to ten power equivalent fission reactors, i.e., large-scale development appears to provide a foreseeable-future technology that greatly reduces the necessity of high integrity waste storage (burial) time: from 107 to just over 102 yr.