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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.
Elham Gharibshahi, Miltos Alamaniotis
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 8 | August 2022 | Pages 1006-1019
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2035182
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper, the optical properties of lead-thorium (Pb-Th), lead-uranium (Pb-U), and lead-cobalt (Pb-Co) nuclear nanoparticles in a container filled with water are simulated and modeled employing finite element analysis (FEA) for diverse particle sizes. The simulated absorption maxima of electronic excitations of nuclear nanoparticles such as Pb-U are red-shifted from 375 to 380 nm for the first peak, from 595 to 600 nm for the second peak, and from 730 to 740 nm for the third peak with increasing particle sizes from core U: 7 nm and shell Pb: 2 nm to core U: 9 nm and shell Pb: 2 nm. Moreover, the absorption peak of the Pb-Th and Pb-Co nanoparticles is red-shifted by increasing the particle size. The FEA-simulated optical band gap energies of Pb-Th, Pb-U, and Pb-Co nanoparticles were also obtained, and the data decreased with increasing the particle size. FEA-based simulations have disclosed restrictions intended for Pb-Th and Pb-Co nanoparticles size greater than 9 nm and for Pb-U nanoparticles size larger than 11 nm. The simulation method in this research enables the prediction of optical properties and contributes to the understanding and design of Pb-Th, Pb-U, and Pb-Co nanoparticles in the water container before manufacturing and functionalizing them. The work here is of particular interest in the nuclear security domain and in the nondestructive, remote detection of special nuclear materials (SNM) in water-filled cargo containers, whose manual inspection imposes physical and financial challenges.