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The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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Lightbridge announces first U-Zr fuel rod samples extruded at INL
Lightbridge Corporation announced today that it has reached “a critical milestone” in the development of its extruded solid fuel technology. Coupon samples using an alloy of zirconium and depleted uranium—not the high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) that Lightbridge plans to use to manufacture its fuel for the commercial market—were extruded at Idaho National Laboratory’s Materials and Fuels Complex.
Silva Kalcheva, Edgar Koonen, Pol Gubel
Nuclear Technology | Volume 158 | Number 1 | April 2007 | Pages 36-55
Technical Paper | Best Estimate Methods | doi.org/10.13182/NT07-A3823
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The subject of this paper is estimation of the maximum values of the heat flux at steady-state nominal operating conditions in the Belgian Material Test Reactor (BR2) at SCK-CEN in Mol. A strong variation of the fuel depletion and the heat flux with the azimuthal direction and dependence on the orientation of the fuel element in the core are obtained. The full-scale three-dimensional (3-D) MCNP&ORIGEN-S heterogeneous geometry model of BR2 with a detailed 3-D isotopic fuel depletion profile, including a detailed azimuthal fuel modeling in the annular concentric plate fuel elements, is used to evaluate the variation of the heat flux with the azimuthal direction in the hot plane. The relative azimuthal power distribution is calculated with MCNP and introduced into ORIGEN-S to evaluate the azimuthal isotopic fuel profile. The applied detailed azimuthal fuel modeling is compared with homogeneous fuel depletion in the hot plane. An increase of the maximum value of the heat flux of 5% for low burnt fuel and 20% for highly burnt fuel due to the azimuthal modeling of the fuel depletion is obtained. A strong variation of the heat flux with the orientation of the fuel element in the core, modeled with the azimuthal fuel profile, is observed. Perturbation effects in the maximum value of the heat flux of 10% for low burnt fuel and up to 40% for highly burnt fuel, correlated to different orientations of the fuel element in the core, are obtained.