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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Nano to begin drilling next week in Illinois
It’s been a good month for Nano Nuclear in the state of Illinois. On October 7, the Office of Governor J.B. Pritzker announced that the company would be awarded $6.8 million from the Reimagining Energy and Vehicles in Illinois Act to help fund the development of its new regional research and development facility in the Chicago suburb of Oak Brook.
Emma K. Redfoot, R. A. Borrelli
Nuclear Technology | Volume 204 | Number 3 | December 2018 | Pages 249-259
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1478590
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Growing concerns over the impact of fossil fuels on climate change have driven efforts to find sources of energy with low emissions. In response, fluctuating renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, are growing to meet more of the electricity demand. However, maintaining reliable energy accessibility to the grid requires a stable, nonfluctuating source of power. Nuclear power plants (NPPs) provide nearly emissions-free, reliable energy to the grid (refer to “IPCC Fifth Assessment Report,” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/). To best reduce reliance on fossil fuels while ensuring reliable energy generation and profitability, nuclear renewable hybrid energy systems (NRHESs) focus on tightly coupling renewable generation with a NPP by colocating the generation sources in an industrial park. The industrial park consists of at least the NPP, the renewable energy source, and some form of industrial process that consumes the energy not used by the grid. In this paper, we analyze the computational modeling approaches currently being pursued for NRHESs. We further investigate similarities between nuclear fuel cycle simulators (NFCSs) and NRHESs to determine how NRHES development can benefit from the development of NFCSs. This paper begins by reviewing past research on NRHESs to determine the necessary functionality of modeling software. After determining the necessary software capabilities for an NRHES model, we discuss the characteristics of a NFCS. The characteristics found common to both systems include desirability of a flexible modular design; open source; ability to be coupled to external pieces of software, including economic modeling, optimization methods, and sensitivity analysis; and results that are usable to technical and nontechnical people alike.