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The busyness of the nuclear fuel supply chain
Ken Petersenpresident@ans.org
With all that is happening in the industry these days, the nuclear fuel supply chain is still a hot topic. The Russian assault in Ukraine continues to upend the “where” and “how” of attaining nuclear fuel—and it has also motivated U.S. legislators to act.
Two years into the Russian war with Ukraine, things are different. The Inflation Reduction Act was passed in 2022, authorizing $700 million in funding to support production of high-assay low-enriched uranium in the United States. Meanwhile, the Department of Energy this January issued a $500 million request for proposals to stimulate new HALEU production. The Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2024 includes $2.7 billion in funding for new uranium enrichment production. This funding was diverted from the Civil Nuclear Credits program and will only be released if there is a ban on importing Russian uranium into the United States—which could happen by the time this column is published, as legislation that bans Russian uranium has passed the House as of this writing and is headed for the Senate. Also being considered is legislation that would sanction Russian uranium. Alternatively, the Biden-Harris administration may choose to ban Russian uranium without legislation in order to obtain access to the $2.7 billion in funding.
P. Yarsky, Y. Xu, A. Ward, N. Hudson, T. Downar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 197 | Number 3 | March 2017 | Pages 265-283
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2016.1273707
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
On November 3, 2008, an unexpected drift of the last three of 177 control rods occurred at the Dresden Unit 3 boiling water reactor. The root cause of the control rod drift was the manner in which the hydraulic control units (HCUs) were isolated during the outage. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research (RES) performed a demonstration study of inadvertent control blade drift using RES-sponsored nuclear analysis tools. The smallest margin to recriticality was determined by calculating the control rod worths at each core state using the core simulator PARCS/PATHS and an innovative algorithm to identify the highest worth combination of rods. This study did not try to evaluate any correlation between drifting rods that may occur in a real plant due to the actual physical configuration of the system. The purpose of the analysis was to demonstrate the tools that could be used to analyze the situation if that information is known.
For the current purpose of this demonstration, Edwin Hatch Unit 1 Cycle 3 (H1C3) was selected as the reference core and cycle. Based on the results of these calculations, it was possible to determine the fraction of rod groups that would produce criticality consequences in each of these scenarios. The results confirmed several aspects of conventional thinking, such as the most reactive point being the beginning of the cycle at the coldest conditions. Further, with a single blade drifting out of the core, the analysis results confirm that shutdown margin is maintained. It was found that a small population (about 1%) of drift scenarios with two rods produced criticality consequences according to our best-estimate-plus-uncertainty method, while this fraction increases to about 3.5% for three rods and about 14% for four rods. The results of the study have confirmed the adequacy of the NRC control rod drift analysis methodology; however, the results are not generically applicable and apply only to H1C3.