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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 8–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Japan gets new U for enrichment as global power and fuel plans grow
President Trump is in Japan today, with a visit with new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on the agenda. Takaichi, who took office just last week as Japan’s first female prime minister, has already spoken in favor of nuclear energy and of accelerating the restart of Japan’s long-shuttered power reactors, as Reuters and others have reported. Much of the uranium to power those reactors will be enriched at Japan’s lone enrichment facility—part of Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd.’s Rokkasho fuel complex—which accepted its first delivery of fresh uranium hexafluoride (UF₆) in 11 years earlier this month.
George H. Miley
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 24 | Number 4 | April 1966 | Pages 322-331
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-A16400
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An analysis of a parallel-plate UO2-fueled Fission Electric Cell is developed that includes a detailed treatment of the fission-fragment initial-energy spectrum, energy-charge loss during slowing, and energy dependence of the total range. The treatment of fragment transport is based, as much as possible, on correlations of experimental data. However, available data are skimpy, and several discrepancies, e.g., between available differential and integral energy-loss data, are noted. The importance of an accurate fragment transport model is demonstrated by the differences in efficiencies obtained from this detailed treatment, as opposed to earlier calculations that used simpler models, e.g., relative differences between models of as much as 15 and 80% are attributed to the treatment of the fragment charge and energy loss, respectively. The calculations are also shown to be fairly sensitive to the total-range-mass correlation, but only weakly dependent on the choice of the initial fragment charge. While efficiencies for the parallel-plate cell with reasonable fuel-layer thickness are found to range from 2 to 10%, efficiencies for cylindrical or spherical geometry may be 5 to 6 times this, and the concept may be competitive for certain specialized applications.