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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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.
Sonja D. Schmid
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 9 | September 2021 | Pages 1312-1328
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1837584
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A recent American “mini-series” on Chernobyl, widely watched across the world, presented viewers with the concluding finding that this massive accident had occurred because the reactor design had inherent flaws; flaws that were known but not previously fixed because it was “cheaper” that way. The reactor design in question is the RBMK, and this paper will argue that this design was far from “cheap,” neither then nor now, and that its adoption as the second standard design for the Soviet Union’s nuclear power reactor fleet was based on much more than economic considerations. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to forget that reactor designs are always chosen for a multitude of reasons and never solely based on their technical or economic merits. Based on archival research, interviews, and industry publications, I show that approving and building RBMK reactors made good sense at the time, despite later claims to the contrary. Then I take the examples of a small modular reactor (SMR), the proposed NuScale Power Module, and a fast neutron reactor, TerraPower’s proposed Traveling Wave Reactor, to argue that we witness comparable negotiations today, as new designs for reactors (1) attempt to fit into existing safety and regulatory frameworks, (2) navigate security and nonproliferation concerns, and (3) embody visions of a specific sociotechnical order. I conclude that technical designs never occur in a socioeconomic, political, or cultural vacuum; instead, they are developed by people steeped in social norms, regulatory concerns, and economic expectations of a specific time and place. In the spirit of making this point relevant to practitioners, I will suggest ways of making these implicit frameworks visible, to actively and consciously start tweaking them, while staying aware of the implications that technical choices may have on our social expectations and vice versa.