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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.
José M. Balmisa, Micah D. Lowenthal, Ehud Greenspan, Javier Sanz, Nathan Stone
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 34 | Number 3 | November 1998 | Pages 964-968
Neutronics Experiments and Analysis (Poster Session) | doi.org/10.13182/FST98-A11963737
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new practical method has been developed for calculating neutron-activation inventories of target material in inertial fusion energy (IFE) reactors such as HYLIFE-II. It accounts for irradiation both in the target and in the internal blanket and for material circulation in and out of the primary loop. The continuous removal of target material in the real system is approximated by a batch extraction (BE). A single target is followed through its lifetime in the reactor using “transition matrices” for activation and decay which are generated by the ACAB code package. The inventory of all the isotopes of interest accumulating in the reactor is obtained by superimposing the contribution of single targets. The new BE model simulates, within minutes, the evolution of more than 150 isotopes over the 30-year reactor lifetime, explicitly accounting for the millions of neutron pulses experienced by a single target and summing the inventories of all the targets.