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TEPCO restarts Kashiwazaki Kariwa Unit 6
Earlier today, TEPCO announced that after nearly 15 years, Unit 6 at the Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear power station has been restarted. Following approval from Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA), TEPCO withdrew the reactor’s control rods to initiate startup at 7:02 p.m. local time.
Next, the company will work with the NRA to confirm the safe operation of the plant. “We will carefully verify the integrity of each and every plant facility while suitably addressing any issues that arise and conveying information to the public during each step of the startup process,” TEPCO’s statement said.
Travis M. Greene, Douglas G. Bowen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 10 | October 2021 | Pages 1118-1129
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.1898921
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The first edition of the current American National Standards Institute (ANSI)/American Nuclear Society (ANS) standard ANSI/ANS-8.1-2014, “Nuclear Criticality Safety in Operations with Fissionable Materials Outside Reactors,” was published in 1964 as ASA N6.1-1964, “Safety Standard for Operations with Fissionable Materials Outside Reactors.” In 1969, that standard was revised as ANSI N16.1-1969, “Nuclear Criticality Safety in Operations with Fissionable Materials Outside Reactors.” ANSI N16.1-1969 includes a variety of subcritical limits (SCLs) for uniform aqueous solutions and metals containing fissile nuclides of 233U, 235U, and 239Pu. Furthermore, SCLs are also included for uranium-water lattices. In the 1983 version of ANSI/ANS-8.1 (a revision of ANSI N16.1-1975), the suite of SCLs in the standard was expanded to include 235U enrichment limits for homogeneous uranium-water mixtures and dry/damp oxides, uniform aqueous solutions of low-enriched uranium, and uniform aqueous mixtures of Pu(NO3)4 containing 240Pu in addition to the SCLs included in ANSI N16.1-1969. The SCLs have changed little in subsequent revisions (ANSI/ANS-8.1-1998 and ANSI/ANS-8.1-2014). The ANSI/ANS-8.1-2014 standard is currently being revised to include new SCLs (uranium metal and compounds with enrichments up to 20 wt% 235U) and possible updates to the current SCLs already in the standard, although these new/updated SCLs will not be available to the nuclear criticality safety (NCS) community for a number of years. The original bases for these SCLs were documented in papers in journals such as Nuclear Science and Engineering and in ANS meeting transactions; however, these bases are ambiguous enough that sites and regulators in the United States have not widely endorsed them for safety purposes. The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a comparison study for the SCLs in the ANSI/ANS-8.1-2014 standard using modern codes (SCALE and MCNP) and cross sections (ENDF/B-VIII.0) to provide some assurance about their quality (bias and bias uncertainty) for use in NCS applications and for consideration by the ANS-8.1 Working Group as a reference for future revisions.