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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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2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
November 17–21, 2024
Orlando, FL|Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld
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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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Nuclear new build procurement considerations
It may seem counterintuitive, but the best time to enhance the ability to support operations and maintenance for a new plant is before construction starts. This is one of many lessons learned by the currently operating nuclear fleet. As construction and startup of many nuclear facilities was completed, it quickly became evident that the ability to efficiently support operations and maintenance was limited. Most of the information necessary to establish and manage procurement of spare and replacement items, maintenance, and configuration of the facilities was unavailable and had to be gathered on a case-by-case, “on-demand” basis. Absence of necessary information and the associated challenges resulted in the need for staff augmentation and multiyear-long projects to develop equipment bills of material and maintenance programs and to perform technical evaluations for the huge quantities of spare and replacement items being requested.
Dimitar Altiparmakov
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 175 | Number 3 | November 2013 | Pages 239-249
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE12-71
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents an extension of the equivalence principle to allow distributed resonance self-shielding in a multiregion fuel configuration. Rational expansion of fuel-to-fuel collision probability is applied to establish equivalence between the actual fuel configuration and a homogeneous mixture of hydrogen and resonant absorber, which is a commonly used model to calculate library tables of resonance integrals. The main steps in the derivation are given along with the basic physics assumptions on which the presented approach relies. The method has been implemented in the WIMS-AECL lattice code and is routinely used for calculation of CANDU-type reactor lattices. Its capabilities are illustrated by comparison of WIMS-AECL and MCNP results of 238U resonance capture in a CANDU lattice cell. To determine the optimal rational expansion of the fuel-to-fuel collision probability, the calculations were carried out by varying the number of rational terms from one to six. The results show that four terms are sufficient. Further increase of the number of terms affects the computing time, while the effect on accuracy is negligible. To illustrate the convergence of the results, the fuel subdivision is gradually refined varying the number of fuel pin subdivisions from 1 to 32 equal-area annuli. The results show very good agreement with the reference MCNP calculation.