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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.
T. D. Radcliff, J. R. Parsons, W. S. Johnson, A. E. Ruggles
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 131 | Number 3 | March 1999 | Pages 426-438
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE99-A2044
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An existing geometric and fluid-fluid scaled facility is applied to investigate the transport of borated safety injection (SI) fluid in the Westinghouse AP600 reactor vessel during a main steam-line rupture (MSLR) event. The AP600 reactor has coaxial injection into the vessel downcomer rather than the cold-leg cross-flow injection typical of operating power reactors. This gas-flow test facility has unique detail in the representation of the SI nozzle-to-core inlet path most important to SI transport. Analysis of the transport phenomena expected in the reactor and the scaled facility, given MSLR conditions, indicates that both buoyancy and turbulent diffusion can have comparable influences on SI transport. It is shown that different reactor-to-experiment velocity ratios are required to scale each phenomenon. Tests are performed to evaluate transient SI fluid concentration at the core inlet using the appropriate velocity ratios to scale buoyancy and diffusion. Two asymmetric loop-flow boundary conditions representative of the MSLR event as well as a symmetric flow condition are applied. While no one test result is fully similar to the expected reactor transport, this ensemble of tests provides data that are valuable for AP600 numerical model benchmarking.