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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
Proving DRACO will deliver
The United States is now closer than it has been in over five decades to launching the first nuclear thermal rocket into space, thanks to DRACO—the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit.
Koroush Shirvan, Mujid Kazimi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 184 | Number 3 | December 2013 | Pages 261-273
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A24984
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Increasing the economic competitiveness of nuclear energy is vital to its future. One way to reduce the cost of the plant is by extracting more power from the same volume. A scoping study is conducted to maximize the power density in boiling water reactors (BWRs) under the constraints of using fuel with traditional materials and cylindrical geometry, and enrichments below 5% to enable its licensability with no changes to present facilities. An optimization search over all other design parameters yields a BWR with high power density (BWR-HD) at a power level of 5000 MW(thermal), equivalent to a 26% uprated Advanced BWR (ABWR), the most recently built version of BWR. The BWR-HD utilizes about the same number of wider fuel assemblies, with 16 × 16 pin arrays and 35% shorter active fuel than the 10 × 10 assemblies of the ABWR. The fuel rod diameter and pitch are also reduced to just over 70% of the ABWR values. Thus, it is possible to increase the power density and specific power by 65% while maintaining the nominal ABWR minimum critical power ratio margin. The optimum core pressure is found to be the same as the current 7.2 MPa. The core exit quality is increased to 19% from the ABWR nominal exit quality of 15%. The pin linear heat generation rate is 20% lower, and the core pressure drop and mass of uranium are 30% lower. The BWR-HD's fuel, modeled with FRAPCON 3.4, showed similar performance to the ABWR pin design. This results in 20% reduced operations and maintenance and capital costs per unit energy, but total fuel cycle cost similar to that of the 18-month ABWR fuel cycle.