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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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.
Andrew G. Benson
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 6 | June 2022 | Pages 947-989
Technical Paper – Special section on the Nuclear, Humanities, and Social Science Nexus | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1991762
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Lead time—the duration of construction and commissioning—is an important determinant of the capital cost of nuclear power plants (NPPs). For an industry dominated by a handful of multinational firms, the degree of cross-national variation is surprising. NPP lead times have historically trended upward over time in Western nations, and yet they are comparatively quick and stable in East Asia. I theorize that the institutional capacity and autonomy of subnational governments can partially explain these patterns in the data. Having assembled a novel data set on the design specifications of the global population of NPPs, I empirically document a positive association between political decentralization and NPP lead time that is not explained by observed cross-country differences in NPP design. The results are suggestive of the hypothesis that political decentralization creates conditions that slow NPP construction for nontechnical reasons. However, the findings are not robust to certain robustness checks and fail to rule out the possibility that unobserved differences in design explain this association.