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A closer look at the initial NLIC selections—Part 2
In January, the Department of Energy announced its new Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus (NLIC) program, inviting states via a request for information to express their interest in hosting a facility supporting work from the front to the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle.
By April, 26 states had expressed interest in hosting such a facility. At the end of July, the DOE signed memorandums of understanding with five states—Idaho, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Utah—to more closely explore the possibilities of state-federal partnerships. These MOUs are not firm commitments from either the federal or state governments. Time will tell which—if any—of the five states develop projects through the program. In the meantime, today, we are taking a close look at what Utah, Idaho, Tennessee can offer in terms of a preexisting nuclear sector that could support new fuel cycle developments.
Kim Wei Chin, Rei Kimura, Hiroshi Sagara, Kosuke Tanabe
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 7 | July 2022 | Pages 852-872
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.2018927
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Past studies validated the feasibility of the photofission reaction ratio (PFRR) method using both Gaussian and bremsstrahlung photons to estimate the isotopic composition of nuclear fuel materials without relying on their self-generated neutron information. However, the current PFRR method cannot solve a multinuclide system with more than two nuclides because the instability of the inverse matrix increases with the addition of the number of nuclides. Thus, this research proposes a numerical method for solving the simultaneous equations of a three-nuclide system onto PFRR to estimate the isotopic composition of nuclides. The results show good reproducibility with all cases maintained within a 10% isotopic composition difference except cases 6 and 7 of the first two photon energy combination schemes with maximum composition differences of 15.6% and 13.9% for 10% actual composition, respectively. A 20% actual composition of case 5 for the second photon energy combination scheme has a deviation of 10.6%, which is slightly larger than the 10% composition difference too. Out of three photon energy combination schemes, 6 MeV – 6.5 MeV – 11 MeV has the highest coefficient of determination for all three nuclides and the smallest deviation of below 10% composition difference. Random sampling with normal distribution was performed on the loss to photofission particles from MCNP with 200 sets for each 10 cases on the 6 MeV – 7 MeV – 11 MeV photon energy combination to study the stochastic errors. The isotopic compositions were calculated with the same numerical method, and the difference between the estimated and actual compositions that resulted were fitted with R. The fitting results show good agreement within 91.5% confidence intervals.