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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.
W. R. Marcum, B. G. Woods, M. R. Hartman, S. R. Reese, T. S. Palmer, S. T. Keller
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 162 | Number 3 | July 2009 | Pages 261-274
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE08-63
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Oregon State University has recently conducted a complete core conversion analysis as part of the Reduced Enrichment for Research and Test Reactors Program. The goals of the thermal-hydraulic steady-state analysis were to calculate natural-circulation flow rates, coolant temperatures, and fuel temperatures as a function of core power, as well as peak values of fuel temperature, cladding temperature, surface heat flux, critical heat flux ratio, and temperature profiles in the hot channel for both the highly enriched uranium and low-enriched uranium cores.RELAP5-3D Version 2.4.2 was used for all computational modeling during the thermal-hydraulic analysis. This is a lumped parameter code forcing engineering assumptions to be made during the analysis. A single-hot-channel model's results are compared to results produced from more refined two- and eight-channel models in order to identify variations in thermal-hydraulic characteristics as a function of spatial refinement.