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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
Why should safeguards by design be a global effort?
Jeremy Whitlock
I can’t think of a more exciting time to be working in nuclear, with the diversity of advanced reactor development and increasing global support for nuclear in sustainable energy planning. But we can’t lose sight of the need to plan for efficient international safeguards at the same time.
Global nuclear deployment has been underpinned since 1970 by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), making it a key customer requirement for governments to demonstrate unequivocally that the technology is not being misused for weapons development.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has helped verify this commitment for more than 50 years, but it has never safeguarded many of the advanced reactors (and related fuel cycle processes) being developed today.
Florent Heidet, Ehud Greenspan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 181 | Number 2 | February 2013 | Pages 251-273
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors/Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A15782
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A preliminary feasibility study is performed for a sodium-cooled breed-and-burn (B&B) fast reactor core for achieving high uranium utilization without solid fission product separation that could fit within a reactor vessel of the dimensions of SuperPRISM (S-PRISM). This 1000-MW(thermal) B&B core is to be fueled with depleted uranium with the exception of the fissile loading required for achieving initial criticality. When the fuel reaches its radiation damage limit, it is reconditioned using the melt-refining process and reloaded into the core until it runs out of reactivity.It is found that the maximum burnup at which the S-PRISM-sized B&B core can be designed to discharge its fuel is 43% fissions per initial metal atom. The corresponding uranium utilization is nearly 90 times higher than that of a light water reactor. The achievable burnup strongly depends on the fuel volume fraction but is almost insensitive to the core power density, fuel-reconditioning frequency, and duration of the fuel-reconditioning process.