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Front-end nuclear fuel supply cooperation: Turning allied interdependence into strategic advantage
The global nuclear revival, which is fueled by unprecedented demand for firm, affordable, dispatchable power for artificial intelligence and data center build-out, energy security imperatives, and climate commitments, has exposed a structural reality of the Western fuel cycle: No single allied nation currently possesses the full suite of front-end capabilities. From mining through conversion, enrichment, fabrication, and the emerging deconversion and metallization steps required for reactor fuels, capability is distributed across Canada, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States (collectively, the “Sapporo Five”), as well as a small group of close partners.
J. Ernest Wilkins, Jr. Keshav N. Srivastava
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 82 | Number 3 | December 1982 | Pages 316-324
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE82-A19392
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We prove two mathematically rigorous theorems that assert, under certain carefully stated hypotheses, the validity of the Goertzel and Otsuka conclusions that, in a thermal nuclear reactor that has a minimum critical mass, the fuel must be distributed so that the product of the thermal neutron flux and the adjoint thermal neutron flux is a constant in the core and does not exceed that constant in the reflector. These theorems differ from that in the preceding paper in the sense that some of the hypotheses of the earlier theorem have been strengthened and some weakened. The hypotheses can be weakened still further if we restrict attention to a fixed core and are not interested in results concerning the reflector. We also study the second variation of the critical mass functional. Finally, we show that, under some explicitly stated conditions, the multigroup diffusion theory for a thermal reactor can be treated as a special case of our general theory.