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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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Latest News
Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
Fred Cooper, John Dienes
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 68 | Number 3 | December 1978 | Pages 308-321
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE78-A27308
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We investigate the growth of Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities following the deceleration of fuel by a less dense coolant using the method of generalized coordinates, which allows us to study the nonlinear, late-time aspects of the problem as well as the possibility of fuel freezing at the interface. We consider liquid coolant in contact with three possible states of fuel—pure liquid, pure solid, and liquid fuel freezing at the interface—and treat several acceleration mechanisms. Assuming the instability starts at a planar interface as a velocity perturbation proportional to the interfacial velocity, we find that when the fuel is completely frozen or freezing at the interface, instabilities will not grow unless the initial interfacial relative velocity satisfies a relationship of the form where υ0 is the initial relative velocity, ρf the density of the fuel, Y0 the yield strength of the frozen fuel, λ the wavelength of the instability, and L a characteristic length. The specific form of C depends on the acceleration mechanism and when freezing begins. For the case of UO2 and sodium, we follow the growth of the fastest growing wavelength instability for different acceleration mechanisms and determine the impulse needed for instabilities to grow when freezing is occurring at the interface.