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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.
A. K. Knight, F.-Y. Tsai, M. J. Bonino, D. R. Harding
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 45 | Number 2 | March 2004 | Pages 187-196
Technical Paper | Target Fabrication | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A448
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Vapor-deposited polyimide thin films and shells have been developed for use in direct-drive-implosion experiments. The properties of these materials have been previously measured for different processing conditions, which have also been correlated with the material's microstructure. This paper addresses how the different material properties affect the subsequent stage of converting an empty capsule into a cryogenic fusion target containing solid hydrogen-isotope fuel. The advantages and limitations of these properties are defined in terms of (1) the time it takes to permeation-fill and cryogenically cool fusion targets, and (2) how the processing conditions used to realize these properties affect the capsules' specifications and the subsequent implosion. A paraxmetric comparison is presented.A common limitation of all the processing conditions is that the roughness of the polyimide capsules is greater than is desirable. Efforts to improve the smoothness of the asdeposited polyamic acid shells (the precursor to polyimide) involve a combined theoretical and experimental approach. The internal components of the vacuum deposition chamber are theoretically modeled using two simulation codes to cover the pressure regime of interest: a Monte Carlo approach is used for the lowest pressure regime (<10-5 Torr) while a continuum fluid dynamics code (FLUENT) is used to calculate the higher pressure regime (>10-3 Torr). The experimentally measured evaporation mass flux of the monomers resulted in a calculated pressure that corresponded to the measured actual value. The resulting mass-flux distribution to, and around, a capsule quantified the uniformity of the deposition process. The mass flux uniformity varied by 50% over the surface of a capsule and varied by 80% over the surface of the bounced pan.