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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
Meeting Spotlight
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Vogtle-3 shuts down for valve issue
One of the new Vogtle units in Georgia was shut down unexpectedly on Monday last week for a valve issue that has since been investigated and repaired. According to multiple local news outlets, Georgia Power reported on July 17 that Unit 3 was back in service.
Southern Company spokesperson Jacob Hawkins confirmed that Vogtle-3 went off line at 9:25 p.m. local time on July 8 “due to lowering water levels in the steam generators caused by a valve issue on one of the three main feedwater pumps.”
G. M. Petersen, S. E. Skutnik (Univ of Tennessee), R. A. Joseph III (ORNL)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 889-898
A key challenge fulfilling the United States federal government’s obligations under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act is in the transition of used nuclear fuel (UNF) storage away from at-reactor storage and to a consolidated interim storage facility (ISF). The default strategy (Standard Contract) for the Department of Energy is to use the Oldest Fuel First (OFF) allocation strategy, which would entail the federal government prioritizing UNF shipments based on fuel discharge date with the option to prioritize shutdown sites. This may not be the most cost-efficient model given the extensive amount of UNF already at reactor sites. Currently there is no way to preemptively remove fuel from sites that may be close to shutdown or have a higher storage or potential storage cost. As wet storage pools at reactors continue to fill to capacity at operating reactors, the backlog of UNF shipments to the ISF places additional pressure on operators to expand at-reactor dry storage capacity, thus adding to total system costs.
An essential aspect to this transition to a centrally-managed ISF for domestic UNF is in developing appropriate analytical tools to evaluate the effect of factors such as fuel shipment prioritization, logistics, and associated expense. Examples of this analysis would include evaluating fuel offloading prioritization strategies (OFF vs. shutdown sites first), strategies to minimize transfer of UNF to dry storage (i.e., through direct shipment from cooling pools to the ISF), etc.
While the solution space for the scheduling problem is intractably large to admit direct analytical evaluation of optimal solutions, by applying well-established optimization algorithms, it is possible to make a rigorous analytical determination of a UNF removal allocation strategy that minimizes the number of shutdown reactor years. Our findings indicate that the current OFF allocation strategy ranks in the bottom 3% of all possible queuing strategies in terms of total system shutdown reactor years.