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DOE, General Matter team up for new fuel mission at Hanford
The Department of Energy's Office of Environmental Management (EM) on Tuesday announced a partnership with California-based nuclear fuel company General Matter for the potential use of the long-idle Fuels and Materials Examination Facility (FMEF) at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
According to the announcement, the DOE and General Matter have signed a lease to explore the FMEF's potential to be used for advanced nuclear fuel cycle technologies and materials, in part to help satisfy the predicted future requirements of artificial intelligence.
P. Goldschmidt
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 49 | Number 3 | November 1972 | Pages 263-273
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE72-A22541
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle and Robbins’ Criterion allow us to find, in the general case of intermediate reactors, the distribution of fuel enrichment that minimizes the critical mass of a reactor of given power and subject to constraints on the maximum power density and on the enrichment. The two group diffusion model is used in slab geometry. The optimal sequence of control (enrichment) zones is made up of a central constant power density zone, a zone of maximum enrichment, a zone of variable enrichment (where the control is singular) and finally an external zone of minimum enrichment (or a reflector). In the particular case of fast reactors the optimal solution does not include the singular control zone.