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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.
Hiroki Sono, Hiroshi Yanagisawa, Akio Ohno, Takuji Kojima, Noboru Soramasu
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 139 | Number 2 | October 2001 | Pages 209-220
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE01-A2232
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To evaluate neutron and gamma-ray absorbed doses in human bodies at criticality accidents, two kinds of tissue-equivalent dosimeters, a polymer-alanine dosimeter and a thermoluminescent dosimeter (TLD) made of 7Li211B4O7, were applied to dosimetry experiments with ~10% enriched uranyl nitrate solution at the Transient Experiment Critical Facility (TRACY) in the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute. For the experiments, five transient operations were conducted to simulate criticality accidents by varying the conditions of reactivity addition. Very high doses from both neutrons and gamma rays were successfully measured in the range of 1.5 to 1600 Gy by using polymer-alanine dosimeters. The gamma-ray doses were able to be determined in the range of 1 to 900 Gy by using 7Li211B4O7 TLDs. In addition, it is confirmed that the doses are proportional to integrated power during transient operations although the conditions of reactivity addition are different. Since the sensitivity of 7Li211B4O7 to gamma rays is almost the same as that of alanine, the neutron doses are easily evaluated without any complicated correction by subtracting the gamma-ray doses obtained by the 7Li211B4O7 TLDs from the sum of neutron and gamma-ray doses by the polymer-alanine dosimeters. As a result of computational analyses by the MCNP4B code, it is also found that calculated doses agree with measured ones within 95% confidence intervals and the MCNP4B is applicable to the evaluation of neutron and gamma-ray absorbed doses during the transient.