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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.
Richard T. Evans, John K. Mattingly, Dan G. Cacuci
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 176 | Number 3 | March 2014 | Pages 325-338
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-24
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work presents the application of first-order adjoint sensitivity analysis, uncertainty quantification, and data assimilation to a subcritical plutonium benchmark experiment using a modified version of the discrete ordinates radiation transport code Denovo. Previous Monte Carlo simulations of this benchmark saw a consistent overprediction of the mean and variance of the measured neutron multiplicity distribution. It was observed that a small scalar reduction in the value of the 239Pu-induced fission neutron multiplicity was capable of significantly reducing the discrepancies. This work extends those results by computing first-order sensitivities to each nuclide, reaction type, energy, and material region in the benchmark. The sensitivities are then used in a data assimilation methodology to simultaneously calibrate all responses and multigroup nuclear data. The resulting best-estimate values for the energy group differential multiplicity (νEg) are 1σ to 2σ less than the nominal values found in ENDF/B-VII for energies less than ~1.5 MeV.