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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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May 2025
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Latest News
TerraPower begins U.K. regulatory approval process
Seattle-based TerraPower signaled its interest this week in building its Natrium small modular reactor in the United Kingdom, the company announced.
TerraPower sent a letter to the U.K.’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, formally establishing its intention to enter the U.K. generic design assessment (GDA) process. This is TerraPower’s first step in deployment of its Natrium technology—a 345-MW sodium fast reactor coupled with a molten salt energy storage unit—on the international stage.
Kirk Drumheller
Nuclear Technology | Volume 24 | Number 3 | December 1974 | Pages 418-424
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste | doi.org/10.13182/NT74-A31505
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
If a stable non-Earth intercept trajectory or orbit can be assured, extraterrestrial disposal offers the complete removal of long-lived nuclear waste constituents from Earth. The primary unfavorable features are that the concept deals with only part of the waste; possible launch safety problems exist, retrievability and monitoring are difficult, and the concept will require international agreements. Extraterrestrial disposal of the total waste constituents and of only the transuranic elements were considered. However, space disposal of the transuranics only is believed to be the most practical scheme, primarily because of the very high space transport cost per unit of weight. The implementation of space disposal of transuranic waste could be achieved with current technology. This technology is considered to include the space shuttle and the space tug, advanced vehicles that use existing engineering technology. The safety aspects for space disposal primarily include safety during launch and control of the extraterrestrial destination of the waste constituents. The potential for an abort that could cause a release of radionuclides during any one space launching is modestly high; however, relatively small amounts of waste constituents are associated with each launch; and package integrity is high even in an abort. The major energy consumption in space disposal is for propelling the waste to its final destination. This energy consumption for disposal of actinide waste is about 4 to 5 orders of magnitude less than the electrical energy from the original nuclear fuel, depending on the final space destination.