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DOE consortium begins new initiative aimed at growing fuel cycle
The U.S Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, through its Defense Production Act (DPA) Nuclear Fuel Cycle Consortium, has begun a new initiative aimed at securing the nation’s nuclear fuel supply chain.
M. J. Plaster, B. Basoglu, C. L. Bentley, M. E. Dunn, A. E. Ruggles, A. D. Wilkinson, T. Yamamoto, H. L. Dodds
Nuclear Technology | Volume 111 | Number 2 | August 1995 | Pages 219-226
Technical Paper | Nuclear Criticality Safety Special / Nuclear Criticality Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A35131
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A hypothetical nuclear criticality accident in a waste supercompactor is examined. The material being compressed in the compactor is a homogeneous mixture of beryllium and 239Pu. The point-kinetics equations with simple thermal-hydraulic feedback are used to model the transient behavior of the system. A lumped-parameter energy balance is used to determine the bulk temperature of the system. A computer code has been developed to solve the model equations. The computer code calculates the fission power history, fission yield, bulk temperature of the system, and several other thermal-hydraulic parameters of interest. Calculations have been performed for the waste supercompactor for various material misloading configurations. The peak power for the various accident scenarios varies from 1.04 × 1017 to 4.85 × 1020 fissions per second (fps). The total yield varies from 8.21 × 1017 to 7.73 × 1018 fissions, and the bulk temperature of the system varies from 412 to >912 K.