ATOMICALLY SPEAKING | The Lab That Closes the Loop: A Conversation with SRNL Director Johney Green
In this episode, NENSC Co-Chair Daniel Poneman sits down with Johney Green — Director of Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) and President and CEO of Battelle Savannah River Alliance — for a conversation on the part of the nuclear enterprise most people never see: what happens to nuclear material after it comes out of a reactor, and why that determines how far the nuclear renaissance can go.
Green explains SRNL's unique niche as the government's deepest bench on tritium, uranium, plutonium, and separations chemistry, untangles excess weapons plutonium from the roughly 94,000 tons of used commercial fuel, and describes what restarting H-Canyon and HB-Line would mean for a domestic advanced-reactor fuel supply and for breaking China's chokehold on critical materials.
He also makes the case for putting AI, automation, and robotics to work on nuclear materials handling, where the hot-cell technology is decades old and the opportunity is enormous.