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Spent fuel recycling and conditioning topic of U.S.-Japan meeting
Officials with the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management discussed spent nuclear fuel recycling and conditioning with counterparts from Japan during the 13th U.S.-Japan Technical Meeting of the Civil Nuclear Energy Research and Development Working Group, held recently in Santa Fe, N.M.
R. W. Ostensen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 43 | Number 3 | May 1979 | Pages 301-313
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT79-A19219
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a core disruptive accident in a liquid-metal fast breeder reactor, rearrangement of core materials may lead to a prompt critical excursion. Damage to the primary containment, especially the head seals and head bolts, caused by the subsequent core disassembly is a primary concern of hypothetical accident analysis. A systematic study has been performed to evaluate the sensitivity of that damage in a commercial size reactor to various uncertainties. The damage is very insensitive to the equation-of-state of the fuel but highly sensitive to the reactivity ramp rate through prompt critical. From the point of view of vessel damage calculations, these results indicate that there is little incentive to improve our equation-of-state data on unirradiated mixed-oxide fuel.