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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.
Nicolas Shugart, Jeffrey King, Jake Jacobson
Nuclear Technology | Volume 204 | Number 2 | November 2018 | Pages 147-161
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1469350
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
SafeGuards Analysis (SGA) is a toolbox developed to allow engineers and scientists to create detailed simulations of safeguards material control and accountability simulations. SGA accepts material flow data from an external material flow model and can be used with any existing fuel cycle or material control code. This paper examines some new developments to the SGA code that allow the code to consider material losses over long time frames. The first scenario described in this paper examined an enrichment facility consisting of two material balance areas (MBAs). Cumulative sum and basic control chart tests were evaluated for a case involving a loss of material from both MBAs simultaneously and a case in which material is removed from the facility over a timescale of double the one that the tests were calibrated to detect. A second scenario represents an entire fuel cycle consisting of four MBAs and two materials of interest (low-enriched uranium and plutonium). This scenario evaluated the calibrated safeguards system with three blind unidentified stream cases, with the goal of determining the calibrated system’s ability to detect where the material loss occurred in each case. SGA was able to produce the expected results for all of the examples examined in this paper, demonstrating that modules produced using the toolbox are capable of examining larger systems in realistic multi-MBA scenarios.