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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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.
Guillaume Giudicelli, Kord Smith, Benoit Forget
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 11 | November 2020 | Pages 1044-1055
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1765606
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A recent hybrid stochastic-deterministic calculation scheme using Monte Carlo–tallied group cross sections in a deterministic solver uses the best of both worlds for accurate and fast reactor agnostic transport simulations. However, neglecting the angular dependence of group cross sections induces large self-shielding errors in resonance groups, causing a large reactivity bias up to 300 pcm in light water reactors. To recover this error, we introduce a two-scale assembly transport calculation scheme: cross sections are tallied at the assembly level, while equivalence parameters are computed in a two-dimensional (2-D) pin cell system. We validate a novel equivalence method based on jump conditions on angular fluxes by comparing to the well-established superhomogenization method for 2-D and three-dimensional (3-D) linear source method of characteristics calculations. Test cases include 2-D and 3-D assemblies of two different enrichments with homogeneous and discretized cross-section discretizations. The linear source approximation enables using coarse source-region discretization for these hot zero-power problems. Both equivalence techniques perform similarly, recover the reactivity bias, and achieve near preservation of reaction rates, supporting this multiscale approach to equivalence.