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Terms finalized for Australian uranium exports to India
Following up on an agreement that was signed 12 years ago, Australia and India have finalized the details by which Australian uranium will be exported to India for peaceful purposes and under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The Administrative Arrangement to enable the long-term exports was reached at the Third India–Australia Annual Summit, held in Melbourne on July 9. The summit coincided with a meeting between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
Anthony M. Scopatz, Erich A. Schneider, Jun Li, Man-Sung Yim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 183 | Number 1 | July 2013 | Pages 45-61
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A16991
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Technology development and deployment decisions are justified by weighing their costs against the expected benefits. Multiple nuclear fuel cycle (NFC) simulation models have been devised, some with the aim of quantifying cyclewide sensitivities to variations from base-case scenarios. Base-case sensitivity studies often perturb only one parameter at a time and only in the region around the initial value. This paper details a sensitivity study methodology that applies entropy-based statistical methods of information theory to describe outcomes produced by an NFC model. This supersedes past efforts at sensitivity and uncertainty analysis by allowing a much larger space to be explored. Here, 30 independent fuel cycle parameters for a fast reactor-light water reactor hybrid scenario are varied simultaneously and stochastically. This fuel cycle schema was chosen as a well-known, sufficiently complex model; the underlying statistical methods could be applied to any cycle. This study uses the uncertainty coefficient computed from contingency tables (CTs) to represent the sensitivity of a technology-defining input to the response. The response of interest here was taken to be the deep geologic repository capacity for a given realization of fuel cycle inputs. After computing the uncertainty coefficients, the inputs themselves are sorted based on decreasing sensitivities. Fast reactor used fuel plutonium separations were found to be most important to the cycle. Furthermore, to represent input covariances (the effect of one input on the sensitivity of a second input to the response), a new measure is defined on three-dimensional CTs. This metric is the coefficient of the variation of uncertainty coefficient of two-dimensional slices of the original table. Sorting by this sensitivity of sensitivity metric, the input pair of fast reactor americium separations together with high-level-waste storage time was found to have the largest joint effect on the repository capacity.