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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.
Thomas K. S. Liang, Chin-Jang Chang, Huan-Jen Hung
Nuclear Technology | Volume 139 | Number 3 | September 2002 | Pages 233-252
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT02-A3316
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In light water reactors, particularly the pressurized water reactor (PWR), the severity of a loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) would limit how high the reactor power can operate. Although the best-estimate LOCA licensing methodology can provide the greatest margin on the peak cladding temperature (PCT) evaluation during a LOCA, it generally takes much more resources to develop. Instead, implementation of evaluation models required by Appendix K of 10CFR50 on an advanced thermal-hydraulic platform such as RELAP5, TRAC, etc., also can gain significant margin for the PCT calculation. Through compliance evaluation against Appendix K of 10CFR50, all of the required evaluation models have been implemented in RELAP5-3D. To verify and assess the development of the Appendix K version of RELAP5-3D, nine kinds of separate-effects experiments and eight sets of LOCA integral experiments were adopted. Through the assessments against separate-effects experiments, the success of the code modification in accordance with Appendix K of 10CFR50 was demonstrated. Besides, one set of a typical integral large-break LOCA from Loss-of-Fluid Test Facility experiments (L2-5) has also been applied to preliminarily evaluate the integral performance of the Appendix K version of RELAP5-3D. The PCT predicted by the evaluation models is greater than the one from best-estimate calculation in the whole LOCA history with the conservatism of 150 K, and the measured PCTs of L2-5 are also well bounded by the evaluation model calculation. Another seven sets of integral-effect experiments will be further applied in the next step to ensure the reasonable integral conservatism of the newly developed LOCA licensing analysis code (RELAP5-3DK/INER), which can cover all the phases of both large- and small LOCA in one code.