Highlights from first panel of the 2026 ANS Annual Conference

Yesterday, the American Nuclear Society's Annual Conference got off to an exciting start with an opening plenary that in its first half featured extensive commentary from ANS CEO Craig Piercy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Ho Nieh, the Department of Energy's Michael Goff, and several others key leaders in the U.S. nuclear industry.

After a brief break, attendees returned to the ballroom of the Denver Sheraton for the second half of the opening plenary: a panel discussion featuring Rita Baranwal, chief nuclear officer of Radiant; Alexander Valys, president and chief technology officer of Xcimer Energy; and Jenifer Shafer, a professor in the Department of Chemistry at the Colorado School of Mines.

In all, the panel offered a broad look at the current intersections between academia and the fission and fusion industries while also highlighting the most exciting nuclear developments currently developing-in Colorado in particular.

Starting off: Amy Roma, a partner at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe and the panel's moderator, kicked off the panel by asking Baranwal to give an overview of Radiant's portfolio. Baranwal covered Radiant's plans to mass produce its 1-MWe TRISO-fueled, helium-cooled Kaleidos reactor. The company "is just finishing up its first reactor build," she said, which will be shipped to Idaho National Laboratory to be tested at the National Reactor Innovation Center's DOME. The company's second reactor will be deployed at Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora, Colo. Baranwal also highlighted that Radiant recently broke ground on R-50, its Oak Ridge, Tenn., facility where it plans to build 50 reactors a year.

Valys then gave a similar overview of work being done at Xcimer, a laser fusion company building on the breakthroughs achieved at the National Ignition Facility with a goal of commercializing inertial confinement fusion. He said that Xcimer, which is participating in the Department of Energy's Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program, recently completed its "first major engineering activity as a company, which is the construction of our prototype laser system." He described the prototype, called Phoenix, as "the largest privately owned laser system in the world."

Roma then shifted the conversation to Shafer, who recently returned to her professorship after a five-year stint at ARPA-E. When asked what she sees as the role academia can play in supporting fission and fusion commercialization and accelerating innovation, Shafer replied, "When we look at what a company needs to do, there are many things that are on the very near-term critical path that you will execute on. That is not where you want your university partner." She explained that, instead, a university can best lend a hand in longer-term projects or the "version two" of what is currently being developed.

The roadblocks ahead: Both Baranwal and Valys offered some thoughts on their current worries for their respective deployments and how those concerns tie into broader needs for the fusion and fission industries.

"The congestion that we are seeing with respect to the folks that are lining up for parts of the supply chain" is an area of concern for Baranwal, made more difficult by trying to discern "who is really serious about their timelines." Roma agreed, adding that "across the board, it's hard to sort out the noise" and discern "who is real and who can actually support the schedules that they anticipate."

Valys voiced a similar concern. "For fusion today, the biggest challenge in supply chain is actually manufacturing capability and lead times. In our facility here in Denver, we waited a year to have a fairly small laser chamber fabricated. If you're trying to do things on a start-up scale and iterate fast, waiting a year for a fundamental component to build a prototype is pretty terrible." He added that, in his view, scaling up the domestic high-end manufacturing capability is one of the highest priorities for the industry to succeed.

Roma responded that, in that scaling work, there will be significant "cross-pollination" between several industries. For example, the same fundamental technology used to enrich uranium is used to enrich lithium. She argued, then, that investment on either side of the industry will often be a "rising-tides-lift-all-boats opportunity for commercialization."