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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 8–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Japan gets new U for enrichment as global power and fuel plans grow
President Trump is in Japan today, with a visit with new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on the agenda. Takaichi, who took office just last week as Japan’s first female prime minister, has already spoken in favor of nuclear energy and of accelerating the restart of Japan’s long-shuttered power reactors, as Reuters and others have reported. Much of the uranium to power those reactors will be enriched at Japan’s lone enrichment facility—part of Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd.’s Rokkasho fuel complex—which accepted its first delivery of fresh uranium hexafluoride (UF₆) in 11 years earlier this month.
Kwang-Il Ahn, Hee-Dong Kim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 130 | Number 2 | May 2000 | Pages 132-144
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT00-A3082
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Continuous efforts to identify and better understand the uncertainties have changed many model parameters and physical phenomena employed in the phenomenological transient models or related computer codes to be estimated by more detailed models. Since their true forms are often not known, however, different modeling assumptions have resulted in various forms of model elements even for a given phenomenon, allowing for different results in the code predictions. In a situation in which there are no rigorous ways to decide the credibility of a specific model element over another, these different model elements can become additional contributors to an overall uncertainty of the physical model predictions. In recent times, most uncertainty analyses of physical models have been focused on the model parameters, without considering the impact of these different model elements. Such levels of uncertainty analysis can only explore a subspace of the true uncertainty space of physical models, and thus the resultant uncertainty tends to underestimate the magnitude of possible uncertainties. Regarding the modeling sources of uncertainty, on the other hand, a model sensitivity analysis has been conventionally utilized to assess the effects of each model element on the code predictions. However, such types of analysis cannot systematically account for synergistic effects of all constituent model elements on the code predictions. A formal procedure is provided for characterizing probabilistically two different sources of uncertainty addressed in the phenomenological transient models (i.e., parametric and modeling sources) and their statistical propagation to obtain the overall uncertainties in the physical model predictions.