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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.
James P. Blanchard, Carl Martin
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 1 | January 2015 | Pages 158-166
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-796
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The ARIES team is currently proposing two tungsten divertor concepts for its tokamak designs and has performed extensive analyses to optimize their thermal and structural performance. Because of the high divertor operating temperatures and the low ductility of tungsten, thermal creep and fracture will be important failure mechanisms to consider. This paper presents a series of finite element analyses addressing the viable operating ranges of these tungsten plate divertor concepts with respect to creep and fracture. For fracture, the J-integral, a path-independent contour integral that estimates the strain energy release rate for a crack of assumed geometry, is used to address crack propagation. Elliptical surface cracks are introduced both inside and outside the coolant channel, and steady-state calculations are carried out for both full-power and cold shutdown conditions. It is determined that the critical crack is on the inside of the coolant channel with the highest stress intensities at full-power operation. Also, transient creep simulations are performed to predict the high-temperature thermal deformations and creep strains at various surface flux levels. Finally, transient thermal calculations are carried out to simulate edge-localized modes in the plasma, and conclusions are drawn with respect to the severity and frequency of these events with respect to surface melting for the two concepts.