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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
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Lung-Kwang Pan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 89 | Number 1 | January 1990 | Pages 116-125
Technical Paper | Technique | doi.org/10.13182/NT90-A34363
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Destructive gamma-ray analysis of spent-fuel rods from the Taiwan Research Reactor has been performed at the Institute of Nuclear Energy Research. The purpose of the analysis is twofold: to identify the radioactivities, burnup values, and other essential parameters of spent-fuel rods, and to bridge the gap between the predicted and the actual values. The samples of fuel rods are taken from two kinds of irradiated materials: natural uranium metal and uranium dioxide pellets. Each sample is dissolved in nitric acid and diluted to 100 cm3; the uranium in each of these samples is identified down to the order of 10−10 g/cm3 by mass spectroscopy. A high-resolution, high-purity germanium detector coupled with a multichannel analyzer is used to detect 38 multiscaling gamma spectra within a 160-day period. Radioactivities of the evaluated fission products are compared with data from other works and with calculations using the ORIGEN-II code. Eleven of the 18 fission product values are found to be within 20% agreement with the calculated values. Deviations might be due to either an incorrect library file of cumulative fission product yields being used for the theoretical estimates, or to an overestimation of the thermal neutron flux during fuel rod irradiation. Results also indicate that although measurement of the 137Cs activity is an excellent indicator for burnup distribution, the cesium migration might lead to a misinterpretation of the data. Furthermore, the ratio of the activity of either 134Cs or 154Eu to 137Cs can eliminate the migratory effect and give a better approximation of burnup distribution along the axial direction of a spent-fuel rod.
