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Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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How robust is HALEU from a nonproliferation perspective?
Shikha Prasad
High-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) has emerged as a popular fuel choice for advanced small modular reactors due to its long power production periods before refueling. It is currently being pursued by TerraPower, X-energy, BWX Technologies, Kairos, Oklo, and other reactor companies. HALEU has a uranium-235 enrichment ranging from 5 percent to 20 percent, whereas traditional LWRs use low-enriched uranium fuel enriched up to 5 percent.
HALEU will provide power for longer durations, compared with traditional LWRs. But could it also provide an opportunity for more rapid proliferation, as is speculated in a 2023 National Academy of Sciences report on advanced nuclear reactors (nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/26630/)?
If a nuclear proliferator conspires to divert fresh nuclear fuel for weapons production when it has not been used in a reactor, the effort required in separative work units (SWUs) to enrich U-235 from 5 percent to 90 percent and that required to enrich from 20 percent to 90 percent are both very small, compared with the effort required to enrich U-235 from its natural abundance to the initial 5 percent.
Workshop
Sunday, April 21, 2024|8:00AM–12:00PM PDT|Franciscan A
Price: $49
Westinghouse Electric Company recognizes the importance of supporting students pursuing a career in reactor physics. For this reason, Westinghouse will be sponsoring the first 100 student workshop registrants by covering their fees. Contact registrar@ans.org for a discount code before registering. Limited space available in each workshop. Once these seats are filled, you will be put on a waitlist. You must request a discount code before registering. No refunds will be made if you do not contact us before registering.
Organized by Ville Valtavirta, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland
Kraken is a computational reactor analysis framework developed at VTT for both safety analyses and general research and educational purposes. With the neutronics side building heavily on the in-house Monte Carlo code Serpent, the framework couples novel Finnish solvers for core physics but also couples to state-of-the-art third party solvers. The Python based multi-physics driver Cerberus and the Python package of pre- and post-processing methods KrakenTools aim to simplify core analysis tasks.
This workshop is designed to give introductory training to new and upcoming. To participate in the hands-on portion of this workshop, participants must bring their own laptops with Kraken installed. Kraken will be available through RSICC ( https://rsicc.ornl.gov/ ) and OECD/NEA ( https://www.oecd-nea.org/dbcps/ ) in the near future. An update will be sent once the license can be requested. Participants who are not able to bring their laptop or to obtain the Kraken software in time may still attend the workshop. The material (including inputs for the examples) will be available to license holders in the Kraken-wiki after the workshop.
Agenda:
• Welcome + short introduction to Kraken
• Pre- and post-processing capabilities for Serpent users
• Cerberus - the very simple Python API for Kraken solvers
• Running Serpent via Cerberus - powerful new capabilities
• Reactor analysis with Kraken
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