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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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New laws offer nuclear industry incentives for existing power plant uprates
This year, the U.S. nuclear industry received a much-needed economic boost that could help preserve operating nuclear power plants and incentivize upgrades that extend their lifespan and power output.
Signed into law in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act offers production tax credits (PTCs) for existing nuclear power plants and either PTCs or investment tax credits (ITCs) for new carbon-free generation. These credits could make power uprates—increasing the maximum power level at which a commercial plant may operate—a much more appealing option for utilities.
Karl O. Ott, Robert C. Borg
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 62 | Number 2 | February 1977 | Pages 243-261
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE77-A26960
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An in-depth discussion of the problems of the current description of the growth rate (or doubling time) of breeder reactor fuel emphasizes the need for conceptually improved computational procedures. The presented derivation of improved measures for the growth of breeder reactor fuel is based on a formally correct description of the fast reactor fuel cycle. From these derivations one obtains a hierarchy of four logically different expressions for the fuel growth rate, which yield formally the same value. The first (and most general) definition is obtained by mathematically expressing the doubling time as a measure of the asymptotically exponential growth of fuel in a system of identical breeder reactors. The second definition represents the condensation of the detailed information of the equilibrium fuel cycle analysis for a single reactor. The third growth rate expression is also based on the detailed fuel cycle analysis. Coefficients of an“integrated fuel cycle model” are obtained from the detailed information. This leads to an eigenvalue problem with the growth rate as eigenvalue and the equilibrium plutonium composition as eigenvector. The fourth growth rate expression is based on a set of isotopic weight factors, which is obtained as solution of the adjoint of the fuel cycle eigenvalue problem employed in the third procedure. The resulting “breeding worth factors” are applied to the production and consumption rates of the four plutonium isotopes. This makes the resulting doubling time formula stationary with respect to variations about a reference reactor and practically independent of the fuel composition.