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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.
Michael G. Lysenko, Hing-Ip Wong, G. Ivan Maldonado
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 132 | Number 1 | May 1999 | Pages 78-89
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE99-A2050
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Although artificial neural networks (ANNs) are powerful tools in terms of their high posttraining computational speed and their flexibility to construct complex nonlinear mappings from relatively few known data samples, a survey of past applications of ANNs to the area of core parameter prediction reveals drawbacks such as low prediction accuracy, lack of robust generalization, large network dimensionality, and typically high training requirements. This study provides a brief survey of past and recent applications of ANNs to direct core parameter predictions as well as an alternate hybrid approach that avoids the aforementioned shortcomings of ANNs by combining the mathematical rigor of generalized perturbation theory along with the strong qualities of ANNs in error prediction situations. The results presented focus exclusively on the neutron diffusion's fundamental mode eigenvalue (i.e., 1/keff) and demonstrate the viability of computationally inexpensive adaptive ANN error controllers for perturbation theory applications.