The September issue of Nuclear News focuses on nuclear fuel and includes what I think is one of the best lines to ever appear in these pages: "The nuclear industry is entering into a weird dead-end where advanced reactor designers may in fact have invented the energy equivalent of a better mousetrap-but in a place that can no longer supply the cheese for bait." Those words, referring to the need for high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel for new reactor designs, were written by Matt Wald in his feature "The U.S. nuclear fuel Gordian knot: The uncertain path forward," which starts on page 20. (The article is the third and final in Wald's series on nuclear fuel; the first story appeared in the June 2023 issue of NN, p. 30, and the second was published in the July 2023 issue, p. 40.) As you will read in the sidebar column to Wald's article, "HALEU: The who, what, when, where ... and how much," commercial HALEU is currently projected to be available in 2028- three years after the initial Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program timeline anticipated it would be needed.
展开▼
