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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.
Richard Sanchez, Li Mao, Simone Santandrea
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 140 | Number 1 | January 2002 | Pages 23-50
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE140-23
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Boundary conditions are an essential part of the approximations used in the numerical solution of the transport equation. The collision probability and the characteristic methods are considered, and exact and approximated tracking methods to be used in the implementation of geometrical motions and albedo conditions are analyzed. The analysis of the exact boundary-condition treatment is carried out for finite domains and infinite lattices, where periodic trajectories must be used. Albedo-like boundary conditions may be used to approximate exact geometrical motions via spatially piecewise constant and either piecewise constant or discrete angular approximations for the boundary fluxes. We also have examined angular product quadrature formulas and shown that the recently proposed Bickley-Naylor quadratures do not respect particle conservation in the presence of anisotropy of scattering. Numerical examples show that the approximated albedo-type boundary method converges toward the results obtained with the exact boundary treatment. However, because of problems related to the multigroup implementation, numerical extra burden in group iterations prevents the efficient use of approximated boundary conditions for multigroup calculations. Nevertheless, this method remains a candidate of choice for use in multidomain calculations via interface boundary fluxes.