Meetings

Rasmussen

The plenary sessions held earlier this month in Florida at the 2023 ANS Utility Working Conference were focused on the concept of resilience, the meeting’s theme. The August 9 plenary, which was moderated by UWC general chair Matt Rasmussen, senior vice president of engineering and operations support for the Tennessee Valley Authority, included presentations by Chris Glover, president and chief executive officer of Volkswagen Chattanooga; Petro Kotin, president of Ukraine’s nuclear plant operator Energoatom; and Steve L. Robbins of S. L. Robbins and Associates. The session’s opening remarks were provided by Rep. Byron Donalds (R., Fla.).

More than 700 registered attendees descended on Florida’s Marco Island for the ANS Utility Working Conference this week, with many traveling through a wave of severe storms to get there—a fitting start to a meeting themed “Building Resiliency in a Rapidly Changing World.”

Three days of panels and educational sessions formally opened on Monday, August 7, with a plenary on “The Nuclear Industry’s State of Resiliency” featuring three invited speakers: Annie Caputo, NRC commissioner; Bob Willard, president and chief executive officer of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations; and Jeff Lyash, president and CEO of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Matthew Rasmussen, general chair of the UWC and senior vice president for engineering and operations support at TVA, introduced the speakers following opening remarks from ANS President Kenneth Petersen and ANS Executive Director/CEO Craig Piercy. Together, the plenary speakers pointed to challenges ahead in ensuring effective leadership, nuclear plant resilience, and energy security—and found cause for celebration in the recent and long-awaited announcement of commercial operation at Vogtle-3.

The American Nuclear Society’s national meetings and ANS’s honors and awards program are a unique pairing. Through the program, ANS recognizes outstanding achievements and meritorious services in the various fields served by the Society. Every year, ANS awards are split into two, with some awarded in June at the Annual Meeting and others in November at the Winter Meeting.

Take note! Registration closes today for the U.S. Department of Energy Conference for Newcomers: Understanding Exports of Advanced Reactor Technologies, scheduled for July 26–27 at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Ill.

Contact Mercedes Trent (mercedes.trent@nnsa.doe.gov) to sign up for the conference. Additional information will follow upon registration.

Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org

Wow, that was a banger! The 2023 Annual Meeting had the energy level of an ANS Student Conference. That’s no easy feat. I’ve had several requests for my opening plenary remarks. Here is a shortened version, edited for reading:

So, “Failure Is Not an Option.” I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure about it in the beginning. It’s not anodyne like “Powering Our Future!” or some punny Indy reference like “Racing to the Finish.” It didn’t seem to fit our situation.

That phrase, popularized by the movie Apollo 13, has its origins in a time of crisis: three men trying to “eyeball” a free return trajectory to Earth while a team of NASA engineers figures out how to literally put a square peg into a round hole to save the astronauts’ lives.

Advanced reactors may be key to a clean energy future, but to prove it they’re going to need fuel—and that fuel will be derived from limited uranium resources and managed throughout the nuclear fuel cycle, whether that cycle is open (like the current fuel cycle) or closed (with reprocessing). Six panelists convened on June 12 during the Annual Meeting of the American Nuclear Society for the executive session “Merits and Viability of Advanced Nuclear Fuel Cycles: A Discussion with the National Academies.” They discussed those fuel cycles and the findings of a National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) consensus committee released as a draft report in November 2022 and published earlier this year.

At the 2023 ANS Annual Meeting, Steven Arndt (as of the close of the meeting, ANS immediate past president) led a president’s session on the mission of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—a not particularly surprising topic, given that he spent over 30 years at the agency in various roles.

The “The State of Nuclear” panel discussion on June 13 at the 2023 American Nuclear Society Annual Meeting focused on how geopolitical issues are affecting federal, state, and international laws, regulations, and funding regarding nuclear technology. The discussion was chaired by ANS Executive Director/CEO Craig Piercy.

Arndt

The American Nuclear Society’s annual meeting opened on Sunday, June 11, in Indianapolis, Ind., and will run through June 14. The meeting’s theme is “Failure Is Not an Option.”

ANS president Steven Arndt, who ends his yearlong term at the meeting’s end, addressed the audience at the opening plenary on Monday, June 12, noting that nuclear science and technology’s road has been long, but it is up to ANS members and other advocates to push forward the nuclear enterprise’s momentum for a sustainable future.

Before announcing ANS chief executive officer and executive director Craig Piercy to the stage, Arndt thanked the volunteer members, meeting sponsors, and ANS staff, among others, for making ANS meetings happen.

The American Nuclear Society's 2023 Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo is accepting applications for knowledge managers to work during the meeting. The UWC, which will have a theme of “Building Resiliency in a Rapidly Changing World,” will be held at the JW Marriott Marco Island Beach Resort on Marco Island, Fla., on August 6–9, 2023.

The ANS Operations and Power Division will pay the conference registration fee for up to six knowledge managers, who also will receive three complimentary nights of housing at the Marriott resort.

Further details on the conference are available online.

At the ANS Winter Meeting in Phoenix, the Diversity and Inclusion in ANS (DIA) Committee hosted the second annual Nuclear Family Feud event as a way for ANS members and meeting attendees to have fun by gamifying the workshop, polling the community, and increasing engagement.

The International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management conference plenary, held in November during the 2022 ANS Winter Meeting, highlighted tight communication among physical, social, and political science experts as the key to successful waste management programs. The four featured speakers provided an international perspective on this issue.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has opened registration for its 35th annual Regulatory Information Conference (RIC 2023) The conference, themed “Navigating the Nuclear Future,” will be held March 14–16 in North Bethesda, Md., and will be the first in-person RIC since 2019, although the event will also be accessible virtually.

Register now. Registration, which is required to attend, can be completed by filling out the conference registration online form. The conference is free to the public.

This year the American Nuclear Society’s Nuclear and Emerging Technologies for Space (NETS 2023) conference, which will be held May 7–11, 2023, in Idaho Falls, Idaho, is focusing on powering the next era of space exploration through nuclear-enabled technologies and is sure to be the can’t-miss event of the year for those in the aerospace community.

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.

Nuclear energy is no longer on the fringes of the international climate conversation. At COP27, the United Nations climate change conference held in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, from November 6 to 18, pronuclear advocates were everywhere—and they were talking to everyone. They populated the International Atomic Energy Agency’s #Atoms4Climate pavilion, the first-ever nuclear pavilion in the 27-year history of the negotiations. Echoing such strong representation, the final statement issued by the conference used language that included nuclear power.

Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org

There are worse places to be than Vienna, Austria, in the early fall. The place has an old-world vibe for sure. The U-Bahn doesn’t have turnstiles; it runs on the honor system. People take care to dress up before they amble down the Kärntner Strasse, the city’s main shopping district.

Every September, a little further north, 3,000 delegates from around the world, along with 200 representatives from nongovernmental organizations, descend on the Vienna International Center of the United Nations—the VIC, for short—for the International Atomic Energy Agency’s General Conference. Attendees ply its curving hallways and attend side events, engage in meetings on the margins, and tour the national booth displays.

Inside the large, purpose-built plenary hall, a seemingly endless procession of national speakers, each allotted seven minutes (with flashing red digits to let all know who’s run over time), tout their nation’s achievements in nuclear technology and express its views on nuclear matters of any sort. As an accredited NGO, ANS has a desk in the plenary complete with microphone and wireless translation headset. An IAEA plenary is a highly scripted affair—one that looks boring at first glance, but once you put the headphones on and get acclimated to the vagaries of real-time translation, a coherent and interesting picture starts to emerge.

Knoxville, Tenn., next July 15-21 will be the place to be for the nuclear community, with two ANS-sponsored meetings being held together. This is a first for ANS-sponsored meetings and will prove to be a can't-miss event. That said, the call for abstracts for the 2023 Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control & Human-Machine Interface Technologies (NPIC&HMIT) and Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Analysis (PSA) meetings is now open and is set to close soon—submissions will be accepted until November 18.

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 American Nuclear Society is hosting the side event panel "Advanced Nuclear Reactors: A Possible Solution to Global Warming and Global Energy Poverty" at the Global Clean Energy Action Forum’s Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM) . The event will be held at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, Pa., on Thursday, September 22, from 1:45 to 2:45 p.m. EDT.

The event is open to all CEM participants.