ANS policy statement on U-233
The American Nuclear Society — the professional organization of nuclear engineers and scientists in the United States — published Position Statement #47 in January 2026. It is titled “Management of Surplus U.S. Nuclear Material.” It calls out uranium-233 specifically. And it says, in the clearest possible professional language, that what DOE is doing to our…
Twenty years of “Energy From Thorium”
Twenty years ago today, on the afternoon of Saturday, April 22, 2006, I started this blog and wrote the first post. I was thirty-one years old. I was working at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, as an aerospace engineer on nuclear-power concepts for deep-space missions. I was in my third year of…
Uranium from Fluorinated SNF to CANDUs?
A recent article at Decouple examined the CANDU reactor as a potential destination for reprocessed uranium (RepU) from LWR spent fuel. The concept is straightforward: CANDU reactors run on natural uranium, and the U-235 remaining in spent LWR fuel exceeds the natural uranium threshold, so RepU blended with depleted uranium to produce a natural uranium…
Rebuttal to Elina Charatsidou thorium video
Elina Charatsidou is a Greek PhD student at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, where she researches accident-tolerant solid fuels for lead-cooled fast reactors — specifically uranium nitride and SIMFUEL pellets. Before her PhD she completed a master’s thesis internship at Westinghouse Electric, working on machine learning approaches to nuclear fuel fabrication. She…
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