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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
Nuclear Technology
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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.
B. P. Bromley, A. V. Colton
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 8 | August 2021 | Pages 1193-1215
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1853466
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Lattice physics and core physics studies have been carried out to investigate the reactor physics feasibility of destroying americium (Am) and curium (Cm) using special target fuel bundles in blanket fuel channels in a heterogeneous seed-blanket pressure tube heavy water reactor (PT-HWR) core fueled primarily with natural uranium. Results indicate that it should be feasible to achieve net-zero production of Am in a single PT-HWR core using 10 to 16 dedicated blanket channels containing Am-based target bundles while only one dedicated blanket channel would be required for achieving net-zero production of Cm. While the use of target blanket fuel bundles with fuel elements made of Am or Cm mixed with thorium (Th) in oxide form ((Am,Th)O2, (Cm,Th)O2) is expected to be suitable for transmutation purposes, the use of fuel elements made of pure americium oxide, especially those in the form of AmO1.55, may not be suitable for transmutation purposes because of potential issues with fuel melting under high-power operations or postulated accident scenarios. The potential to achieve net-zero production of Am and Cm in a single thermal-spectrum reactor, such as a PT-HWR, could help eliminate the need to build and qualify a deep geological repository (DGR) capable of storing minor actinides for a long time (>1 million years). At the very least, the size and/or number of DGRs required for storing radioactive waste could be reduced significantly. Thus, destroying Am and Cm in PT-HWRs could be regarded as a viable solution to the perceived problem of nuclear waste and may help improve public acceptance of the use of nuclear energy. In addition, it may be possible to apply a similar approach for destroying MAs in other Generation III+ (Gen-III+)/Generation IV (Gen-IV)/small modular reactor (SMR) technologies.