ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Robotics & Remote Systems
The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
Meeting Spotlight
ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Feb 2025
Jul 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
March 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
February 2025
Latest News
RP3C Community of Practice’s fifth anniversary
In February, the Community of Practice (CoP) webinar series, hosted by the American Nuclear Society Standards Board’s Risk-informed, Performance-based Principles and Policies Committee (RP3C), celebrated its fifth anniversary. Like so many online events, these CoPs brought people together at a time when interacting with others became challenging in early 2020. Since the kickoff CoP, which highlighted the impact that systems engineering has on the design of NuScale’s small modular reactor, the last Friday of most months has featured a new speaker leading a discussion on the use of risk-informed, performance-based (RIPB) thinking in the nuclear industry. Providing a venue to convene for people within ANS and those who found their way online by another route, CoPs are an opportunity for the community to receive answers to their burning questions about the subject at hand. With 50–100 active online participants most months, the conversation is always lively, and knowledge flows freely.
Masumichi Koizumi, Katsuyuki Ohtsuka, Hiroto Isagawa, Hideo Akiyama, Akio Todokoro
Nuclear Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | April 1983 | Pages 55-70
Technical Paper | Chemical Processing | doi.org/10.13182/NT83-A33143
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Along the line of a nonproliferation policy for nuclear materials, the development of a process for the co-conversion of Pu-U nitrate mixed solutions to mixed-oxide (MOX) powder has been carried out, and through the bench-scale experimental work performed at the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation, a new co-conversion process using a microwave heating method has been successfully developed. Using the bench-scale test unit with a 2 kg of MOX/day capacity, designed on the basis of the results of mock-up tests, the feasibility of this process has been demonstrated with good results. In this test unit installed in the Plutonium Fuel Fabrication Facility, a fixed volume (∼7.2 ℓ )of Pu-U nitrate mixed solution [∼270 g (Pu + U)/ℓ] is fed into a denitration vessel placed in a fixed position on the denitration apparatus. When microwave power (2450 MHz; maximum 16 kW) is applied to the mixed solution, the solution is directly heated and changed to PUO2−UO3 MOX through the denitration reaction. This PUO2−UO3 MOX is then scraped off the denitration vessel and transferred so the subsequent processes of calcination-reduction and pulverization can be performed. In these processes, it is changed to PuO2−UO2 MOX powder, which is suitable for pellet fabrication. Through the basic experiments with the test unit, some important data were successfully obtained concerning the feasibility of the test unit, powder characteristics of the product, and impurity pickups during the denitration process. At present, using this unit, plutonium nitrate solution transported from the Tokai Reprocessing Plant is being converted to MOX powder which has a Pu/U ratio = 1. Stable operation continues and the products have been used without any difficulty as the raw material for advanced test reactor “FUGEN” reloading fuel fabrication. Judging from the result of these experiments, the co-conversion process using a microwave heating method has been found to have many excellent advantages, such as good powder characteristics of the product, simplicity of the process, good homogeneity of the plutonium and uranium oxide, minimum liquid waste, no impurity pickup during denitration, no possibility of changing the Pu/U ratio, and small “material unaccounted for” through the process. This co-conversion process has been adapted to the main process of the co-conversion facility with a 10 kg of MOX/day capacity, which is now under construction as the end process of the Tokai Reprocessing Plant.