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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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ANS joins others in seeking to discuss SNF/HLW impasse
The American Nuclear Society joined seven other organizations to send a letter to Energy Secretary Christopher Wright on July 8, asking to meet with him to discuss “the restoration of a highly functioning program to meet DOE’s legal responsibility to manage and dispose of the nation’s commercial and legacy defense spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive waste (HLW).”
Tae-Hoon Lee, Spencer Menlove, Howard O. Menlove, Hee-Sung Shin, Ho-Dong Kim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 7 | July 2020 | Pages 984-992
Regular Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1743598
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The transuranic (TRU) ingot is considered to be the most prominent target material of pyroprocessing in terms of safeguards since it contains almost all of the Pu of the feed spent fuel. Due to the high density, excessively high neutron emission rates, and high neutron multiplication of the U/TRU ingot, it is impractical to apply gamma-ray spectroscopy or neutron coincidence counting techniques to the quantification of the Pu content of the U/TRU ingot. Since the passive neutron albedo reactivity (PNAR) technique is known to be sensitive to the total fissile mass of target material and the uncertainty of its singles Cd ratio is independent of the accidental coincidence coming from the high neutron emission rate, the capability of the PNAR technique for the quantification of the Pu content of the U/TRU ingot has been investigated using the MCNPX code with a spent fuel library with 81 different cases of various kinds of initial enrichment, burnup, and cooling time. The MCNPX simulation results for the Cd ratio versus Pu content of the U/TRU ingot show the maximum error in the Pu mass between the linear fit and the real Pu content in the U/TRU ingot is 2.14% for 4.5 wt% initial enrichment cases. The results of this study show that the PNAR technique can be one possible method for the direct nondestructive assay for the Pu of the U/TRU ingot.