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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.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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Nuclear News 40 Under 40 discuss the future of nuclear
Seven members of the inaugural Nuclear News 40 Under 40 came together on March 4 to discuss the current state of nuclear energy and what the future might hold for science, industry, and the public in terms of nuclear development.
To hear more insights from this talented group of young professionals, watch the “40 Under 40 Roundtable: Perspectives from Nuclear’s Rising Stars” on the ANS website.
Lucas Wodrich, Alvin J. H. Lee, Tomasz Kozlowski, Caleb S. Brooks
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 6 | June 2023 | Pages 809-834
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2161276
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Microreactors present an opportunity to revolutionize the role of nuclear energy via the development of these technologies in a diverse and distributed energy network for a clean energy future. Because of the limited output of these novel systems, the deployment of microreactors should be focused on high-value applications in order to realize their full potential. This involves understanding the microreactor performance and how it interacts with the preexisting infrastructure. In this work, an energy-diverse embedded grid is modeled using OpenModelica in order to study the impact of microreactor integration under several distinct deployment approaches. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) is used as a prototypic market due to its well-characterized energy ecosystem with available extensive real-time and historical data. The UIUC model recreates the existing chilled-water, steam, and electricity infrastructure, including wind, solar, and cogeneration sources. The infrastructure model simulates the interplay between the three utilities and how different microreactor integration approaches would impact UIUC’s embedded grid. From this study, the deployment of a single microreactor under electric load-conditioning, steam production retrofit, or a hybrid of both is found to be the most appropriate in consideration of their unique advantages toward cost savings and grid resilience. Meanwhile, if grid resiliency is not a main objective, the greatest emissions reduction and cost-savings benefits can be obtained by operating the reactor in a base-loading configuration. This study employed historically low coal and gas prices and provided a conservatively low estimate for the benefits from a microreactor. Given the price volatility of fossil fuels, the benefits of the microreactor are expected to be greater than this estimate. Finally, the modular nature of the modeling framework allows for an extension of the analysis to other similar embedded grids.