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Division Spotlight
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.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Standards Program
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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Latest News
Why should safeguards by design be a global effort?
Jeremy Whitlock
I can’t think of a more exciting time to be working in nuclear, with the diversity of advanced reactor development and increasing global support for nuclear in sustainable energy planning. But we can’t lose sight of the need to plan for efficient international safeguards at the same time.
Global nuclear deployment has been underpinned since 1970 by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), making it a key customer requirement for governments to demonstrate unequivocally that the technology is not being misused for weapons development.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has helped verify this commitment for more than 50 years, but it has never safeguarded many of the advanced reactors (and related fuel cycle processes) being developed today.
Timothy Ironman, James Tulenko, Ghatu Subhash
Nuclear Technology | Volume 200 | Number 2 | November 2017 | Pages 144-158
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1360714
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The viability of spark plasma sintering (SPS) for fabrication of industrial-grade nuclear fuel pellets is explored by utilizing die designs for single- and multiple-pellet manufacturing. Traditional UO2 pellets were also manufactured by systematically varying processing temperature and pressure as needed for single- and multiple-pellet fabrication. The pellets were then qualified against commercial fuel specifications for density, shape, microstructure, and surface flaws. Pellets produced one at a time met all commercial specifications except for grain size. Pellets produced in batches of two, four, and eight pellets showed suboptimal density indicating that further changes to sintering conditions are warranted. Additionally, commonly used graphite tooling for pellet fabrication was shown to be ineffective in producing large numbers of fuel pellets, as the die and punches were shown to undergo severe wear in each run thus decreasing the reliability of the tooling for production of pellets as per the specification. Finally, additional discussion is provided for identifying the avenues for scale-up of SPS to meet the current commercial demand of 400 million pellets/year. These studies are viewed as first step toward assessing the ability of SPS technology to meet the quality specifications and quantity demands of nuclear fuel pellets.