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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
Argonne research aims to improve nuclear fuel recycling and metal recovery
Servis
Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory are investigating a used nuclear fuel recycling technology that could lead to a scaled-down and more efficient approach to metal recovery, according to a recent news article from the lab. The research, led by Argonne radiochemist Anna Servis with funding from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E), could have an impact beyond the nuclear fuel cycle and improve other high-value metal processing, such as rare earth recovery, according to Argonne.
The research: Servis’s work is being carried out under ARPA-E’s CURIE (Converting UNF Radioisotopes Into Energy) program. The specific project—Radioisotope Capture Intensification Using Rotating Packed Bed Contactors—started in 2023 and is scheduled to end in January 2026.
Bennet Krasch, Robin Größle, Daniel Kuntz, Sebastian Mirz
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 4 | May 2020 | Pages 481-487
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1718841
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A crucial part of the closed fuel cycle of future fusion power plants will be isotope separation, which takes place in a cryogenic distillation refraction column, where all six hydrogen isotopologues are separated due to their different vapor pressures at a given temperature. For monitoring and process controlling, the Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe has investigated liquid hydrogen by infrared (IR) absorption spectroscopy and presented the first successful calibration for the inactive isotopologues. Now, the new Tritium Absorption InfraRed Spectroscopy 2 (T2ApIR) experiment, which is fully tritium compatible, is under construction and aims to provide a calibration for concentration measurements of all six hydrogen isotopologues in solid, liquid, and gaseous phases via not only IR absorption but also Raman spectroscopy. One major challenge of the new experiment so far has been the design of the cryostat, which had to fulfill diverse technical and safety requirements regarding tritium compatibility, cryogenics, and overpressure and the combination of optical components for Raman and IR spectroscopy.
