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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
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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
TerraPower begins U.K. regulatory approval process
Seattle-based TerraPower signaled its interest this week in building its Natrium small modular reactor in the United Kingdom, the company announced.
TerraPower sent a letter to the U.K.’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, formally establishing its intention to enter the U.K. generic design assessment (GDA) process. This is TerraPower’s first step in deployment of its Natrium technology—a 345-MW sodium fast reactor coupled with a molten salt energy storage unit—on the international stage.
V. O. Uotinen, B. R. Leonard, Jr., and, R. C. Liikala
Nuclear Technology | Volume 18 | Number 2 | May 1973 | Pages 115-140
Technical Paper | A Review of Plutonium Utilization in Thermal Reactors / Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT73-A31283
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The available experimental reactor physics data related to problems of plutonium recycle have been reviewed and analyzed. Included were data from both basic lattice studies and irradiation experiments. It is concluded that there exists a reasonable amount of experimental data on clean lattice critical arrays. Extension of the data base to include more information on fine structure parameters would improve the usefulness of the experimental data base for testing design methods. The principal area where neutronic data are lacking is in the irradiation behavior of plutonium-fueled cores. The precision of the basic cross-section data for plutonium isotopes is reviewed. The precision to which the cross sections for the plutonium isotopes is known is nearly comparable to that for the uranium isotopes. On the basis of theory-experiment comparisons that have been published by several groups, the accuracy of existing calculational models needs to be improved. The principal area for improvement appears to be in calculating the thermal-neutron spectrum in plutonium-fueled systems.