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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.
Stéphanie Tillement, Frédéric Garcias
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 9 | September 2021 | Pages 1291-1311
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1868892
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Very few papers exist in the field of social sciences that follow and study nuclear infrastructure design projects from the inside. Such a perspective would make it possible to understand the mechanisms of their successes or difficulties at their very origin. At a time when high hopes are placed on civil nuclear energy to solve the climate issue, but when simultaneously, nuclear industry actors are facing major difficulties in a great number of flagship projects, this situated understanding of any given project’s trajectory becomes crucially important. This paper proposes an analysis, from the inside, of a project that, about ten years ago, raised great expectations from both the French and global nuclear industry, but which, in 2019, was finally halted. This project is that of a so-called fourth generation sodium reactor: the Advanced Sodium Technological Reactor for Industrial Demonstration (ASTRID). ASTRID was a new sodium-cooled fast reactor. Begun in 2010, the project’s development was suspended at the end of 2019 by the French authorities. Through an inductive study of the project in the making, conducted from 2015 to 2019, the research team was able to follow the project trajectory and carry out nearly 30 interviews with actors directly involved in the project itself. By studying ASTRID as an infrastructure development project and building on the concepts of scale and infrastructure from the literature, the ASTRID project’s halt can be understood. The project’s suspension was the result of the increasing complexity and ambiguity faced by project members and stakeholders in aligning the local and global scales as the new infrastructure was developed, and more precisely, the ASTRID project infrastructure and the global nuclear infrastructure. Our analyses show that ASTRID’s trajectory gradually drifted as a result of three misalignments between the project’s infrastructure and the global nuclear infrastructure: a temporal, social, and physical misalignment. As a result, the project identity can be described as having been vague and ambiguous. This paper sets out how such a lack of clarity impacted design practices, the project organization as a whole, and the ASTRID trajectory. In consequence, it is crucially important that lessons are learned from the project’s cessation to understand both the difficulties related to the nuclear renaissance and in terms of the field of project management in general.