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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Sellafield awards $3.86B in infrastructure contracts to three companies
Sellafield Ltd., the site license company overseeing the decommissioning of the U.K.’s Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria, England, announced the award of £2.9 billion (about $3.86 billion) in infrastructure support contracts to the companies of Morgan Sindall Infrastructure, Costain, and HOCHTIEF (UK) Construction.
L. Eric Smith, Naeem M. Abdurrahman
Nuclear Technology | Volume 140 | Number 3 | December 2002 | Pages 328-349
Technical Paper | Radiation Measurements and Instrumentation | doi.org/10.13182/NT02-A3343
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A Monte Carlo study of the neutron slowing-down spectrometry technique for measuring fissile isotopic content in irradiated fuel has been completed. The neutron spectrometer system is characterized in terms of design, slowing-down time relation, isotopic response functions, and assay signals. The nonlinear effect of interrogating neutron self-shielding for a high fissile content fuel is compared to the same parameter for a low fissile content fuel. Simulated assays of 23 different fuel assemblies with a broad range of total fissile mass content (1.3 to 83 wt%) and fissile isotopic ratios are performed and analyzed using two different methods: a linear system model using a least-squares regression analysis and a radial basis neural network. Mean errors using the linear system model for the 23 different fuel types were approximately 20% for 235U and 43% for total plutonium. The radial basis neural network assay signal solutions showed promising results, considerably better than the linear model: 4.9% for 235U, 5.4% for total plutonium, and 0.5% for total fissile content.