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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.
D. Yuan, P. Guss, T. Ashenfelter
Nuclear Technology | Volume 177 | Number 2 | February 2012 | Pages 273-284
Technical Paper | Radiation Measurements and General Instrumentation | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A13371
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Past studies of wavelet technologies for gamma spectral analysis essentially focused on direct fitting of raw gamma spectra, but these studies often failed to produce new benefits for operational adaptation of wavelet analysis. This paper presents a modified wavelet approach with the objective being detecting only the nuclides that do not exist in the environmental background. With this operational objective, wavelet analysis is applied to the background-subtracted count-rate spectra. A preliminary comparison study suggests that this background subtraction - wavelet-fitting process - is independent of the detector type and background radiation and is capable of improving the wavelet peak detection probabilities as compared with earlier published results.