ANS Newswire

Used nuclear fuel storage and transportation have reached a critical juncture. Dozens of utilities need reliable data on how used nuclear fuel performs in dry storage casks and canisters to extend regulatory licenses at sites across the United States. Likewise, the Department of Energy expects to take ownership of the used nuclear fuel—termed “spent nuclear fuel” in the laws and regulations gover…

What fuels the future of nuclear? Whether it is low-enriched uranium, LEU+, or high-assay low-enriched uranium, one of the answers is in the question itself: fuel. Earlier this week, the American Nuclear Society’s Fuel Cycle & Waste Management Division hosted Global 2026, with the theme of “Deploying Sustainable Nuclear Fuel Cycles.” During one plenary session, “Fueling the Future of Nuclear,” pa…

Loumis Lockhart The American Nuclear Society is excited to announce that it has officially selected two of its members to serve as the 2027 Glenn T. Seaborg Congressional Science and Engineering Fellows. Madeline Lockhart and Aristidis Loumis will provide key support to one of the Society’s four strategic pillars of action: informing policymakers to enable better decisions and stronger policies. …

A recent American Nuclear Society webinar featured an extended one-on-one conversation between ANS CEO Craig Piercy and Marla Morales, the acting deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and high-level waste disposition at the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy. The two discussed the future of the fuel cycle in the United States, especially as it relates to the Nuclear Lifecycle Inn…

This summer, two American Nuclear Society student members were supported by the Society in the Washington Internship for Students of Engineering (WISE) Program. Those student members were Bradford Arnold and Blake Bird, each of whom had the opportunity to spend nine weeks in Washington, D.C., learning about the complex intersection between technology and policy.

Using SLAC’s electron camera, researchers recorded timestamps of solid copper atoms (orange) as they melted (yellow) after being blasted with laser heat. This graphic shows how copper atoms changed over a period of several femtoseconds (millionths of a billionth of a second), notated here as fractions of a picosecond. Instead of the predicted collapse, the researchers saw a gradual melting. (Imag…

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued an environmental assessment and finding of no significant impact to Disa Technologies for company’s use of its NRC-licensed high-pressure slurry ablation (HPSA) technology to remediate abandoned uranium mine (AUM) waste at the Mary Ann AUM waste pile site in Montrose County, Colo. Disa Tech, a Wyoming-based mineral processing company, submitted a premo…

An artist's sketch and a cross-section view of the DIII-D tokamak. (Images: General Atomics) At the DIII-D National Fusion Facility near San Diego, Calif., home to the largest operating tokamak in North America, researchers from Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility worked to develop a machine learning framework capable of adaptively predicting changes in a tokamak’s hardware. The team’s…

Researchers at Idaho National Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have conducted a three-dimensional study of irradiated U-10Zr—uranium alloyed with 10 percent zirconium—across key radial regions, providing new insights into how the material swells, transfers heat, and interacts with the fuel cladding. U-10Zr was extensively tested in historical sodium-cooled fast reactors an…

The American Nuclear Society is hosting a Supplier Showcase webinar, “Advancing DVR for MUR: Lessons from First-of-a-Kind Projects,” tomorrow, August 18, from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. (CDT) on recent advancements in data validation and reconciliation (DVR). The conversation will also focus on how these advancements have reduced core thermal power measurement uncertainty and enabled measurement unce…