The “How do we talk about the Back End?” session at the ANS Winter Conference & Expo on Wednesday, November 15, focused on recent experiences in communicating about used nuclear fuel to a skeptical public.

The American Nuclear Society’s 2023 Winter Meeting and Expo opened on November 12, and its packed opening plenary the next day generated a lot of buzz. Featured speakers included West Virginia senators Shelley Moore Capito and Joe Manchin as well as Nuclear Regulatory Commission chair Christopher Hanson. They each addressed top issues facing the nuclear enterprise to a full house of more than 1,000 members of the wider nuclear community.

Put nuclear technology in space or on the moon, and just as on Earth it can provide a power density unmatched by any other source. But what roles can nuclear power and propulsion play as the world enters a 21st-century space race? That was a key question put to six speakers during the November 14 American Nuclear Society Winter Meeting plenary session “Space: The (Next) Nuclear Frontier.”

Hopkins

This morning, just ahead of the plenary session “Space: The (Next) Nuclear Frontier,” American Nuclear Society Executive Director/CEO Craig Piercy invited John Hopkins, president and CEO of NuScale Power, to take the stage. The audience knew Hopkins was there not to announce a new contract or business development, but to answer the spoken and unspoken questions that followed last week’s announcement that the Carbon Free Power Project (CFPP)—for years expected to be NuScale’s first operational reactor—had been terminated by mutual agreement of the company and its customer, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS).

Predictably, media headlines have burbled with doubt about the prospects for nuclear energy because one high-profile contract backed by significant cost-shared funds from the Department of Energy had been cancelled—out of dozens of ongoing projects by NuScale and other reactor developers. But those headlines—and the questions of curious ANS members—deserve a response.

In the last few years, public investment in both new and existing nuclear technology has expanded alongside a rise in public support and acceptance. Now is the perfect time for the nuclear industry to seize this momentum by coming together to maintain current nuclear plants, expanding the nuclear workforce, strengthening the supply chain and infrastructure, increasing public- and private-sector investments, and continuing to advocate for the benefits of nuclear power.

In 2022, the American Nuclear Society Board of Directors approached the Diversity and Inclusion in ANS (DIA) committee with the task of revising the ANS Code of Ethics (COE), and at the ANS Winter Meeting this past November, the board gave its approval of the revisions.

Whether commercial demand for high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel ultimately falls at the high or low end of divergent forecasts, one thing is certain: the United States is not ready to meet demand, because it currently has no domestic HALEU enrichment capacity. But conversations happening now could help build the commercial HALEU enrichment infrastructure needed to support advanced reactor deployments. At the 2022 American Nuclear Society Winter Meeting, representatives from three potential HALEU enrichers, the government, and industry met to discuss their timelines and challenges during “Got Fuel? Progress Toward Establishing a Domestic US HALEU Supply,” a November 15 executive session cosponsored by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Division and the Fuel Cycle and Waste Management Division.

At this year’s Winter Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, American Nuclear Society President Steven Arndt honored four ANS members with Presidential Citations. The president of ANS has the privilege of presenting presidential citations to individuals who, in their opinion, have demonstrated outstanding effort in some manner for the benefit of ANS and/or the nuclear community.

The awards are “highlighted throughout our community as a personal outreach to our recipients to say, ‘well done,’” said Arndt.

Part of being the president of the American Nuclear Society is having the honor of awarding Presidential Citations to individuals who, in the opinion of the president, have demonstrated outstanding effort in some manner for the benefit of ANS and/or the nuclear community. ANS President Steven Arndt has named the recipients of this year’s awards, which will be presented at the upcoming Winter Meeting.

The 2022 American Nuclear Society Winter Meeting will be held November 13–17 in Phoenix, Ariz. ANS has named the recipients of eight awards that will be presented at the meeting, as well as one new Fellow, who will be honored during the opening plenary session.

The USS Enterprise (CVN-65), the world's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, has been named an ANS Nuclear Historic Landmark. The designation was officially recognized on December 1 during the ANS Winter Meeting in Washington, D.C.

The inscription on the plaque presented by ANS reads, “In recognition of the most advanced nuclear engineering technology of the 1950s and for her 51 years of service to our nation, the USS Enterprise (CVN-65) is designated as an ANS Nuclear Historic Landmark.”

The ANS Virtual Young Professionals Congress 2021 starts today! You won’t want to miss this gathering of the next generation of nuclear leaders as they host some of the biggest names in nuclear for an immersive personal and professional development experience.

The cost of attending YPC21 is $30 for students and $50 for professionals. Register now.

For more than 50 years, the ANS Honors and Awards Program has recognized outstanding achievements and meritorious service in the various fields served by our Society.

The recipients of the national awards listed below will be honored on November 30 during the opening plenary of the ANS Winter Meeting. Honorees will be notified of their selection by October.

All members are encouraged to review the nomination requirements for these awards and consider nominating a qualified colleague. Many ANS awards are open to non-ANS members, and nominating colleagues who are not members is one way to foster new ANS relationships.

Schultz

George P. Shultz, a former U.S. secretary of state who played a central role in helping bring the Cold War to an end, died Saturday at 100, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University announced.

ANS connection: Shultz, an ANS member, was honored during the 2020 ANS Virtual Winter Meeting with a celebration of his 100th birthday. He provided recorded comments on the increasing challenges facing policy decisions related to climate change, artificial intelligence, and advanced manufacturing/3D printing. Former senator Sam Nunn reviewed Shultz’s “500 years' worth” of accomplishments and service to the United States.

ANS has issued a statement on the passing of George Schultz.

The third part of the“Advanced Nuclear Reactors and Power Systems” sessions during the 2020 ANS Virtual Winter Meeting featured an examination of the status of various advanced reactors. The sessions were sponsored by the Operations and Power Division and chaired by Piyush Sabharwall of Idaho National Laboratory.

Here is an article on the first "Advanced Nuclear Reactors and Power Systems” session.

Presentation topics in the third and final session included using Modelica for system-level modeling and simulation of advanced reactors; the testing of fast-spectrum reactors’ gears and bearings in liquid sodium; and the creation of a simple core analysis tool called the Thermal hydrAulic COre Calculations using the single heAted channel meThod (TACOCAT) code.

Here are some of the highlights:

ANS President Mary Lou Dunzik-Gougar took to the video screen on November 18 during the 2020 ANS Virtual Winter Meeting for the President’s Special Session on radiation risk, echoing a comment by Exelon Nuclear’s Bryan Hanson, the Winter Meeting’s general cochair, who earlier in the week characterized radiation as one of the most misunderstood aspects of nuclear.

“I think that’s very true,” Dunzik-Gougar said. “So much misconception and misunderstanding. I have always had a passion for communicating about such things as radiation, helping people understand the nature of radiation and the relative risks of nuclear, but mostly about its benefits. But I think we in the industry can better prepare ourselves with knowledge about radiation and its impacts and also educate ourselves on how to talk about the risks of radiation with people not in our own echo chambers to help change the perception among a broader scope of people.”

The panel of experts assembled to help impart some of that knowledge to session attendees included Amir A. Bahadori, assistant professor at Kansas State University; Donald A. Cool, a technical executive at the Electric Power Research Institute and a former senior executive at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Paul Locke, associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; and Shaheen Dewji, assistant professor at Texas A&M University.

The session titled “Energy Storage Integration with Nuclear Power Plants,” held on November 17 during the 2020 ANS Virtual Winter Meeting, was sponsored by the Operations and Power Division and chaired by Piyush Sabharwall, of Idaho National Laboratory.

The Fusion Enterprise-I and -II sessions, held on November 18 as part of the TOFE 2020 embedded topical meeting at the 2020 ANS Virtual Winter Meeting, were chaired by Ales Necas, principal scientist at TAE Technologies, and featured presentations by speakers representing companies in the commercial fusion area.

The November 17 session titled “Preview of NPIC&HMIT 2021” was sponsored by the Human Factors, Instrumentation and Controls Division. The session was chaired by Pradeep Ramuhalli, of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and featured four panelists: Ronald L. Boring, of Idaho National Laboratory; Jamie B. Coble, of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville; Raymond L. Herb, of Southern Nuclear Operating Company; and Hyun Gook Kang, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

The panelists provided a preview of trends in I&C and human factors that are likely to be featured at the 12th ANS Topical Meeting on Nuclear Plant Instrumentation and Control and Human-Machine Interface Technology Conference (NPIC&HMIT), which will be held in conjunction with the 2021 ANS Annual Meeting in Providence, R.I., in June. Ramuhalli said that the paper submission process has begun. The NPIC&HMIT 2021 call for papers is available online.

Herb

The industry perspective: Herb, who works on digital modernization for Southern Nuclear’s reactor fleet, reflected on working early in his career with equipment that required daily calibration by I&C techs. “Operators running around the panels, checking here, checking there,” he said. “Now, I see a calm control room for operators at Vogtle-3 and -4 who can operate everything from one chair.”

Herb added that he is not a human factors expert. “All I can do is communicate the needs of the U.S. nuclear industry from my perspective,” he said. Among those needs are realistic task analysis and effective change management. While the U.S. fleet’s original analog control systems were “biased toward ‘no change,’” he said, Southern’s current fleet strategy “is incremental change with every design we put in, to shepherd our existing fleet to something that is closer to Vogtle-3 and -4.”

Boring

New modalities: Boring offered his take on what’s next for human factors. He pointed out that NPIC&HMIT 2019 had four sessions on validation, and that validation is critical because new digital control rooms need to be proven. “Many of our current fleet have had the same control rooms for 40 years,” he said. “We can’t hope to have a digital control room for 40 years—we have to support evolution over time.” He predicted that NPIC&HMIT 2021 will see an emphasis on validation and interaction modalities for new plants, such as microreactors and small modular reactors, including automation.

Coble

University support for data analytics: Coble talked about improving nuclear power economics through data-driven decision-making. Operating plants are being shut down, she said, and a big part of the problem is operating and maintenance costs. “How can we make nuclear more economical?” she asked. “The current approach of frequent equipment monitoring works to keep equipment reliability up but does not help with costs.”

Coble said that there is a need for development in sensors and in models and algorithms that mine large data sets. University research and training can help solve identified problems, she said, but while there is a well-developed data set on light-water reactors, equivalent data is not yet available for advanced reactors that operate differently, making it more difficult to set a risk-informed approach.

Kang

New topics: Kang took attendees on a deep dive into the topics that were presented at NPIC-HMIT 2019 and made some predictions for 2021. Control platforms and status identification and decision-making were well represented in 2019, as were newer topics of cybersecurity and wireless communications. In 2019, Kang said, “Operation automation was discussed, but ‘autonomous operation’ was not discussed yet. . . . I expect we will have more papers regarding this issue in the coming conference.”

That is just one of several topics Kang expects to see at the 2021 meeting, because, he said, I&C is a fast-moving area.

Other anticipated topics include the decision-making process between machine learning applications and human operators and practical cybersecurity solutions.

American Nuclear Society President Mary Lou Dunzik-Gougar recognized four Presidential Citation recipients and the Milton Levenson Distinguished Service Award winner on November 18 during the 2020 ANS Virtual Winter Meeting. The following awards were presented as part of the ANS President’s Special Session.