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Undeclared uranium hitches a ride on cobalt exports from Congo, study says
Philippe (left) and Manzuk quantified the amount of uranium that has been exported from the DRC in cobalt shipments or left behind in the environment. (Photo: Joel Hallberg/UW–Madison)
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Princeton University have published a study in Nature Communications that calls attention to a blind spot in nuclear nonproliferation: The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has exported thousands of metric tons of uranium, and there is no accounting for where it has gone.
In partnership with Lighthouse Reports and the Financial Times, UW–Madison nuclear engineering professor and nuclear security expert Sébastien Philippe and Ryan Manzuk, a geologist and research fellow in Philippe’s group and at Princeton, conducted the study using countrywide mineralization and geochemical data.
Tae-Hoon Lee, Young-Soo Kim, Tae-Je Kwon, Hee-Sung Shin, Ho-Dong Kim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 179 | Number 2 | August 2012 | Pages 196-204
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-77
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In pyroprocessing it is important to determine the amount of Pu in the various streams of materials involved. This paper presents two approaches to determine the Pu mass of spent fuel assemblies using nondestructive assay and burnup simulation code. Cm balance is adopted and the concept of "Cm ratio," the mass ratio of Pu to Cm, is used for the nuclear material accountancy for the model pyroprocessing facility. The biggest error of the nuclear material accountancy is expected to arise from the determination of Pu mass and Cm ratio in input homogeneously mixed uranium oxide powder, which is assayed nondestructively. One approach to determine the Pu mass and Cm ratio is to apply the average burnup of spent fuel and determine the Pu mass and Cm ratio by using the ORIGEN code. The estimated error in Pu mass determined by this method ranges from 0.94% to 2.33% for a total of 225 spent fuel assemblies of various burnup, initial enrichment, and cooling time. The other approach is to use the functional relationship between the neutron emission rate and Pu mass of spent fuel. The error in Pu mass calculated using this method ranges from -1.68% to 3.86%.