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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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DOE on track to deliver high-burnup SNF to Idaho by 2027
The Department of Energy said it anticipated delivering a research cask of high-burnup spent nuclear fuel from Dominion Energy’s North Anna nuclear power plant in Virginia to Idaho National Laboratory by fall 2027. The planned shipment is part of the High Burnup Dry Storage Research Project being conducted by the DOE with the Electric Power Research Institute.
As preparations continue, the DOE said it is working closely with federal agencies as well as tribal and state governments along potential transportation routes to ensure safety, transparency, and readiness every step of the way.
Watch the DOE’s latest video outlining the project here.
Shahla Keyvan, Mark L. Kelly, Xiaolong Song
Nuclear Technology | Volume 119 | Number 3 | September 1997 | Pages 269-275
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT97-A35402
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nuclear fuel must be of high quality before being placed into service in a reactor. Nuclear fuel vendors currently use manual inspection for quality control of the nuclear fuel pellets before they are inserted into the zirconium fuel rods and bundled into assemblies. The feasibility of automating the pellet inspection process using artificial neural networks is examined to improve accuracy, speed, and cost; to reduce employee radiation doses; and to provide defect statistics to the fuel manufacturer. Sample nuclear fuel pellets (252 pellets) are photographed and scanned, and appropriate feature extraction techniques are developed and applied to the scanned images. The extracted features are then used as inputs to a backpropagation neural network. The results indicate that a backpropagation neural network is capable of classifying pellets as good (passing) or bad (failing) with high accuracy.