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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.
Jason Wilson, James Becnel, David Demange, Bernice Rogers
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 8 | November 2019 | Pages 802-809
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1629249
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The tokamak exhaust processing (TEP) system performs chemical separations on ITER fuel cycle process streams. TEP recovers hydrogen isotopes (Q2) from impurities such as argon, nitrogen, tritiated water (Q2O), tritiated ammonia (NQ3), and tritiated hydrocarbons such as methane (CQ4). TEP sends the hydrogen isotopes for subsequent processing to the isotope separation system or the storage and delivery system. At the same time, an impurity gas stream of extremely low tritium content (less than 8.88 TBq of tritium per day) is produced and sent to the detritiation system (DS). To accomplish the separation, the major hydrogen processing subsystems within TEP are hydrogen-like processing (HLP) and air-like processing/water-like processing (ALP/WLP). (Hydrogen-like gases are Q2, He, and Ne; air-like gases are Ar, O2, N2, O2, and CQ4; and water-like gases are Q2O and NQ3). The main processing equipment used for the HLP is a series of palladium-silver permeators (PMs) with ALP/WLP using a series of Palladium Membrane Reactors (PMRs). Aspen Dynamics is the primary tool for verifying system performance of the TEP design. Aspen Dynamics is a commercial, equation-based simulation package for chemical processing. The software enables the user to develop a process model from predefined unit-operation models or construct its own unique unit-operations model. Verification of the TEP simulation model to experimental data was achieved during the TEP conceptual design. The designs for the TEP HLP and ALP/WLP subsystems are examined for the updated gas inputs in terms of compositions and flow rates. The TEP simulation is used to predict tritium output of the TEP processing subsystems This paper describes how the Aspen model of the equipment was improved and used to size the equipment (PMs and PMRs) to process the various gas streams and maintain the discharge to DS to below the limit.