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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
College students help develop waste-measuring device at Hanford
A partnership between Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) and Washington State University has resulted in the development of a device to measure radioactive and chemical tank waste at the Hanford Site. WRPS is the contractor at Hanford for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management.
Robert Petroski, Benoit Forget, Charles Forsberg
Nuclear Technology | Volume 180 | Number 1 | October 2012 | Pages 28-45
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A14517
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A fuel cycle option is evaluated in which fuel bred in breed-and-burn (B&B) reactors is used to start up additional B&B reactors, with the fuel being recycled using limited-separations processes instead of full actinide reprocessing. This fuel cycle aims to minimize processing requirements and proliferation risk while still being able to achieve exponential growth and high uranium utilization. The neutron excess concept is applied to compute the starting fuel requirements of new B&B reactors, allowing fleet doubling times to be estimated. A simple analytic expression for doubling time is derived, which is applied to example B&B reactors using a hypothetical core composition. It is found that larger reactors are able to achieve shorter doubling times because of their smaller starter fuel requirements per unit power. Several variant fuel cycle configurations are examined, and their doubling times are computed.