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GAO: Clarification of HLW definition could save DOE billions
A clearer definition of what constitutes high-level radioactive waste could save the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management “tens of billions of dollars” in waste management costs and accelerate its cleanup schedule by decades, according to a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
DOE-EM’s efforts to manage waste resulting from legacy spent nuclear fuel reprocessing have been hindered for decades by the ambiguity of the statutory definition of HLW as laid out in the Atomic Energy Act and Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the report states. While admitting that the DOE has taken steps to overcome this ambiguity, the GAO says that the department has not fully evaluated all available opportunities to treat and dispose of waste more economically as either transuranic or low-level radioactive waste.
Patrick F. O’Rourke, Scott D. Ramsey, Brian A. Temple
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 8 | August 2022 | Pages 943-981
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2035180
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this work, we apply Lie Group Theory (LGT) to aid in solving and understanding equations arising from the Forward Master Equation formulation for the neutron number distribution in a zero-dimensional setting. In particular, we focus our LGT study on a first-order hyperbolic partial differential equation satisfied by the probability generating function. We show the connection between solutions to the symmetry determining equations with established analytical solutions given by Bell and by Prinja and Souto. We derive global transformations for isolated neutron fission chains as well as neutron sources and provide a physical interpretation of the results throughout.