Nuclear’s moment: The ANS Annual Conference opens in the Mile-High City

The nuclear community descended on Denver, Colo., this week for the American Nuclear Society's Annual Conference, which opened with a packed room and inspiring words from multiple speakers.

Under the theme "Net Out and Power Up," attendees were welcomed by an impressive lineup of keynote speakers. The speakers included ANS CEO Craig Piercy; ANS President Hash Hashemian; conference general chair and partner at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe Amy Roma; NRC Chairman Ho Nieh; ITER Director General Pietro Barabaschi; Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory Director Steven Cowley; TAE Technologies CEO Michl Binderbauer; and DOE Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Michael Goff. Earlier today, they all took the stage and made the case that nuclear energy has arrived at a turning point that may not come again if the moment is not seized.

Piercy framed the stakes from the outset. "The question before us now is not whether we need more power. We do," he told the assembled crowd of industry veterans, researchers, students, and policymakers. "The question is whether we can provide that clean, firm generation at a scalable amount to meet that challenge."

Piercy was candid about the cultural friction between the fission and fusion communities-fusion wondering why fission hasn't solved its waste problem, and fission telling fusion to call when there's an actual power plant-but he argued that this moment demands something different.

"We are at our best when we stop thinking of ourselves as competing camps and start recognizing that we are part of the same larger project. My hope is that we're going to look back on this period not as a moment that we continued to pillow fight, but the moment that we put down our pillows and got to work."

Roma, a veteran nuclear attorney, delivered the morning's sharpest operational reality check. Her central argument was a warning against what she called "bottleneck thinking gone wrong"-the instinct to surge resources at the most visible obstacle while the rest of the system quietly seizes up.

Using a business school analogy about factory management, she told the room that the nuclear industry's tendency to fixate on licensing as the primary barrier to deployment is itself a form of strategic blindness. "If you're only paying attention to licensing, you're thinking about the problem wrong. Your bottleneck is not your NRC licensing," Roma said. "It's a piece of a much bigger pie that you need to think about holistically."

Supply chain gaps, contract risk, financing structures, community relationships-these are the constraints that kill projects long after the ribbon-cutting announcements, and they demand the same level of strategic attention as the regulatory pathway.

Roma reserved particular praise for the fusion community's instinct to think ahead on supply chain. "In the fusion community, oftentimes the only place that can make what you need is in China, and you need a lot of whatever it has," she said. "So a number of companies are onshoring their supply chain." She pointed to Helion Energy's decision to purchase IP rights and build its own high-voltage capacitor manufacturing line as a model of the kind of creative, systems-level thinking the broader nuclear industry needs to adopt.

Her closing message was directed at everyone in the room. "For the people who've been around in the nuclear industry for a long time, let's keep an open mind. People are going to have different and innovative ways of doing things, and we should embrace the change and the disruption. For the new companies, we love your optimism, we love your enthusiasm. But listen to the things that we're saying, because they can inform your business model and help you prevent the bottlenecks I've been describing."

When delivering his keynote address, Nieh did not undersell the moment. "This is the most consequential moment in the history of American nuclear energy in nearly 50 years," he said. Nieh, designated the 20th Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman by President Trump in January after a career that spanned positions from resident inspector to director of the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, built his remarks around three pillars of American nuclear leadership: capability, deployment, and credibility.

On credibility, he was direct. A foreign minister shopping for reactor technology recently told an NRC delegation plainly, "'We want a power plant, not a PowerPoint.' And this country is not going to buy a nuclear reactor that has not been licensed by the regulator and operating in the country supplying it." That exchange, Nieh said, is precisely why the NRC's transformation matters.

Nieh catalogued a year of concrete results: 10 CFR Part 53 was finalized 21 months ahead of schedule, a construction permit for a commercial advanced non-light water reactor was issued nine months early, the first-ever restart pathway was approved for a permanently shut-down reactor, and license renewals now are being delivered in 12 months.

"This is what a disciplined enabling regulator looks like," he said. He was careful to define the term. "Enabling is not a shortcut. It's not a compromise. Enabling is how the NRC fulfills its safety mission and delivers benefit to America." On questions about NRC independence under the current administration, he was blunt: "The whole idea of the NRC rubber-stamping things-that's BS. The NRC is very independent in how it does its technical work." Asked what success looks like at the end of his tenure, he did not hesitate. "Shovels in the ground, and America building nuclear power plants."

ITER's Barabaschi, who has led the multinational fusion project since 2022, offered the most candid accounting of fusion's progress and its remaining challenges. Five of the tokamak's nine vacuum vessel sectors are now installed in the machine in southern France, with the most recent-finished just last week-completed six months ahead of schedule.

Since a major organizational restructuring in 2023, ITER has maintained a schedule performance index of 1.05 and a cost performance index of 1.12. "In 2025, we earned more than twice the value of any year prior to the 2023 reform," Barabaschi said. But he was equally forthcoming about the road ahead. "ITER has been too costly, and any projections we have are indicating a very significant cost."

Commercial fusion, he argued, will require major simplification. "The fact that Hash [Hashemian] said it was the most complex device he had ever seen is for me not really a compliment. A future power plant cannot look like ITER." He welcomed the explosion of private fusion investment as evidence that the field has finally found the competitive dynamic it was missing. "ITER remained for too long the only game in town-and I think that was actually one of the root causes of our delays. Competition is healthy. What we need is a very healthy range of cooperation and competition."

Steven Cowley of PPPL delivered a rigorous technical assessment of fusion progress. Fusion conditions-temperatures of around 200 million degrees-have been achieved. The National Ignition Facility has recorded 2 megajoules of laser light in and 8.6 megajoules of fusion out. But a self-sustained fusion burn remains just out of reach. "Sort of, not quite," Cowley said. "Net electricity out? No. Net money in? We're quite a long way from that."

He noted that China is spending roughly three times what the United States is on fusion and has a road map targeting a pilot plant in the 2030s and commercial power plants in the 2040s. The United States, by contrast, has roughly 50 private fusion companies pursuing a wide range of approaches.

"They can't all be right," Cowley said. "But they're all doing interesting things." He pointed to advances in computational modeling as fusion's most underappreciated asset, arguing that the ability to model plasma turbulence-something that was impossible for most of his career-could dramatically shorten the path to commercial fusion. Princeton's NSTX-U experiment, currently being reassembled with its final component arriving at JFK International Airport in New York tonight, will test those models in the coming years. "Innovation is essential," Cowley said in closing. "But it has to be driven by data and calculations, not by guesses."

There are two days left in Denver, and if this morning is any indication, the conversations happening in the hallways, session rooms, and meeting spaces are the ones that will shape where this industry goes next. Nuclear News will be covering more of the conference for those in the community unable to attend the event in person. Be sure to visit ans.org/news for updates.