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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.
Carolyn McGraw, Germina Ilas
Nuclear Technology | Volume 183 | Number 3 | September 2013 | Pages 436-445
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors / Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A19431
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
New pressurized water reactor (PWR) cross-section libraries were generated for use with the ORIGEN-ARP depletion sequence in the SCALE nuclear analysis code system. These libraries are based on ENDF/B-VII.0 nuclear data and were generated using the two-dimensional depletion sequence, TRITON/NEWT, in SCALE 6.1. The libraries contain multiple burnup-dependent cross sections for seven PWR fuel designs, with enrichments ranging from 1.5 to 6 wt% 235U and burnups from 0 to 90 GW(d)/tonne U. The computational methodology and studies performed to establish an optimal depletion model for cross-section library generation are discussed in this paper. Verification against detailed TRITON simulations for the considered assembly designs showed that depletion calculations performed in ORIGEN-ARP with the pregenerated libraries provide results similar to those obtained with direct TRITON depletion while greatly reducing the computation time. Validation of the libraries, carried out using radiochemical assay measurements and decay heat measurements for PWR spent fuel, showed good agreement between calculated and experimental data.