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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.
Raymond C. Wang, Yunlin Xu, Nathanael Hudson, Thomas J. Downar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 183 | Number 3 | September 2013 | Pages 504-514
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A19437
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Special Power Excursion Reactor Test III (SPERT III) was a series of reactivity insertion experiments conducted in the 1950s. This paper describes the validation of the U.S. NRC coupled code system TRITON/PARCS/TRACE to simulate reactivity insertion accidents (RIA) using several of the SPERT III tests. The NRC coupled code system was used to perform the SPERT III E-Core configuration tests in which the RIA was initiated by the rapid ejection of a central cruciform control rod. The resulting superprompt reactivity excursion and negative Doppler reactivity feedback produced the familiar bell-shaped power increase and decrease. The energy deposition during such a power excursion has important safety consequences, and the SPERT III tests provide a validation basis for the NRC coupled multiphysics codes. The models were developed using the original experiment documentation, and the results of five separate tests were used to validate the TRITON/PARCS/TRACE coupled code system.