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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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ANS sends waste policy recommendations to DOE
The American Nuclear Society has sent a letter to Energy Secretary Chris Wright with a set of recommendations for the Department of Energy to take to establish an effective national program to manage the storage, reprocessing, and final disposal of U.S. commercial used nuclear fuel.
Alex Salazar, Massimiliano Fratoni, Joonhong Ahn (Univ of California, Berkeley), Fumio Hirano (JAEA/International Research Inst for Nuclear Decommissioning)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 600-607
The safety assessment of a geological repository for used nuclear fuel must ensure that future generations are shielded from radiation from fission products, in particular those released by re-criticality events. An investigation is required to understand whether or not criticality can actually be achieved. In fulfilling this end, this study assesses the uncertainty in the composition and total mass of precipitates forming in the far-field due to variation in transport parameters. The Latin Hypercube Sampling technique is employed to generate an accurate, random distribution of variables employed in the transport model and to assess the uncertainty of attaining a critical mass. The average characteristics of the damaged fuel from the Fukushima Daiichi reactor cores is used as the reference waste form. Results are compared to the minimum critical masses of previous studies to assess the criticality safety margin.