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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.
Mustafa H. Almadih, T. Almudhhi, S. Ebrahim, A. Howell, G. R. Garrett, S. M. Bajorek, F. B. Cheung
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 8 | August 2022 | Pages 1290-1300
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.2000558
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this study, boiling regimes have been identified and analyzed along with the corresponding vapor-liquid interfacial morphologies and heat transfer behaviors during quenching of a heated rod using an acoustic measurement technique. The quenching experiments are performed by using cylindrical test samples that are embedded with thermocouples. The experimental work includes investigating the whole range of pool boiling regimes from film boiling through transition boiling to nucleate boiling using Python’s tools of signal processing. The boiling signals are recorded by a special hydrophone (i.e., the HTI-96-Min Exportable, High Tech, Inc.) to register the different sound waves generated by boiling under the water. This special hydrophone is capable of working in boiling water to record high- and low-frequency signals in subcooled pool boiling. The latter has many applications, such as the operations of advanced nuclear reactors, chemical processing, power generation, etc. In this work, the technique of signal processing is employed to identify the boiling regimes and to seek a new understanding of the boiling dynamics, particularly vapor-liquid interfacial morphologies, by applying a new tool for signal processing. Physically, each boiling regime should have a characteristic dominant acoustic signal that can be identified. By correlating the acoustic signatures with the boiling heat fluxes in various regimes, the minimum and maximum heat fluxes measured during the quenching of the cylindrical samples can be identified from the recorded acoustic signals during subcooled pool boiling.