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The Young Members Group works to encourage and enable all young professional members to be actively involved in the efforts and endeavors of the Society at all levels (Professional Divisions, ANS Governance, Local Sections, etc.) as they transition from the role of a student to the role of a professional. It sponsors non-technical workshops and meetings that provide professional development and networking opportunities for young professionals, collaborates with other Divisions and Groups in developing technical and non-technical content for topical and national meetings, encourages its members to participate in the activities of the Groups and Divisions that are closely related to their professional interests as well as in their local sections, introduces young members to the rules and governance structure of the Society, and nominates young professionals for awards and leadership opportunities available to members.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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The busyness of the nuclear fuel supply chain
Ken Petersenpresident@ans.org
With all that is happening in the industry these days, the nuclear fuel supply chain is still a hot topic. The Russian assault in Ukraine continues to upend the “where” and “how” of attaining nuclear fuel—and it has also motivated U.S. legislators to act.
Two years into the Russian war with Ukraine, things are different. The Inflation Reduction Act was passed in 2022, authorizing $700 million in funding to support production of high-assay low-enriched uranium in the United States. Meanwhile, the Department of Energy this January issued a $500 million request for proposals to stimulate new HALEU production. The Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2024 includes $2.7 billion in funding for new uranium enrichment production. This funding was diverted from the Civil Nuclear Credits program and will only be released if there is a ban on importing Russian uranium into the United States—which could happen by the time this column is published, as legislation that bans Russian uranium has passed the House as of this writing and is headed for the Senate. Also being considered is legislation that would sanction Russian uranium. Alternatively, the Biden-Harris administration may choose to ban Russian uranium without legislation in order to obtain access to the $2.7 billion in funding.
Diego Mandelli, Carlo Parisi, Nolan Anderson, Zhegang Ma, Hongbin Zhang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 3 | March 2021 | Pages 389-405
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1794234
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Accident tolerant fuels (ATFs) are new nuclear fuels developed in response to the accident at the Fukushima power station in March 2011. The goal of ATFs is to withstand accident scenarios through better performance compared to currently employed fuels (e.g., small-scale hydrogen generation). This paper targets a method for evaluating and comparing ATF performance from a probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) perspective by employing a newly developed combination of event trees and dynamic PRA methods. Compared to classical PRA methods based on event trees and fault trees, dynamic PRA can evaluate with higher resolution the safety impacts of physics dynamics and the timing/sequencing of events on the accident progression without the need to introduce overly conservative modeling assumptions and success criteria. In this paper, we analyze the impact on the accident progression of three different cladding configurations for two initiating events [a large break loss-of-coolant accident (LB-LOCA) and a station blackout (SBO)] by employing dynamic PRA methods. The goal is to compare the safety performance of ATFs (FeCrAl and Cr-coated cladding) and the currently employed Zr-based clad fuel. We employ two different strategies. The first focuses on the identification of success criteria discrepancies between the accident sequences generated by the classical PRA model and the set of simulation runs generated by dynamic PRA using ATF. The second one, on the other hand, directly uses dynamic PRA to evaluate the impact of timing of events (e.g., recovery actions) on accident progression. By applying these methods to the LB-LOCA and SBO initiating events, we show how dynamic PRA methods can provide analysts with detailed and quantitative information on the safety impact of ATFs.