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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.
Enrique Ramos, Jose E. Roman, Agustín Abarca, Rafael Miró, Juan A. Bermejo, Alberto Ortego, Jose M. Posada
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 187 | Number 3 | September 2017 | Pages 254-267
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1320892
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Thanks to advances in computer technology, it is feasible to obtain detailed reactor core descriptions for safety analysis of the light water reactor (LWR), in order to represent realistically the fuel elements design, as is the case for three-dimensional coupled simulations for local neutron kinetics and thermal hydraulics. This scenario requires an efficient thermal-hydraulic code that can produce a response in a reasonable time for large-scale, detailed models. In two-fluid codes, such as the thermal-hydraulic subchannel code COBRA-TF, the time restriction is even more important, since the set of equations to be solved is more complex. We have developed a message passing interface parallel version of COBRA-TF, called pCTF. The parallel code is based on a cell-oriented domain decomposition approach, and performs well in models that consist of many cells. The Jacobian matrix is computed in parallel, with each processor in charge of calculating the coefficients related to a subset of the cells. Furthermore, the resulting system of linear equations is also solved in parallel, by exploiting solvers and preconditioners from PETSc. The goal of this study is to demonstrate the capability of the recently developed pCTF/PARCS coupled code to simulate large cores with a pin-by-pin level of detail in an acceptable computational time, using for this purpose two control rod drop operational transients that took place in the core of a three-loop pressurized water reactor. As a result, the main safety parameters of the core hot channel have been calculated by the coupled code in a pin level of detail, obtaining best estimate results for this transient.