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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.
Abdelfatah Abdelmaksoud, Said Haggag, Magdy M. Zaky, Moussa Osman
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 9 | September 2022 | Pages 1471-1483
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2035644
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the present study, an analysis of a hypothetical complete loss-of-coolant accident in a typical open-pool research reactor is conducted. The reactor core is assumed to be completely uncovered and exposed to the ambient air. The possibility of passively cooling the decay heat of the exposed reactor core by natural convection to air and thermal radiation until core reflooding is investigated. A three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics analysis is conducted for the uncovered core while cooled by air natural convection and thermal radiation. The reactor core is simulated as a porous zone with decay heat generation specified as a cosine-shape distribution. The reactor core decay heat acts as a driving force for the coolant flow from the cold leg to the hot leg. The thermal equilibrium porous media model is used to represent the energy equation inside the core region. This study is conducted for core uncover time (the time interval between reactor shutdown and the moment when the reactor core is drained of water) of 10E3, 10E4, 10E5, 10E6, 10E7, and 10E8 s. Contour plots of temperature, velocity, density, and pressure at different values of core uncover time are illustrated. It’s found that for core uncover times of 10E3, and 10E4 s, the maximum core temperature exceeds the cladding melting point. The core maximum temperature is well below the melting point for uncover times of 10E5, 10E6, 10E7, and 10E8 s.