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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Take steps on SNF and HLW disposal
Matt Bowen
With a new administration and Congress, it is time once again to ponder what will happen—if anything—on U.S. spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste management policy over the next few years. One element of the forthcoming discussion seems clear: The executive and legislative branches are eager to talk about recycling commercial SNF. Whatever the merits of doing so, it does not obviate the need for one or more facilities for disposal of remaining long-lived radionuclides. For that reason, making progress on U.S. disposal capabilities remains urgent, lest the associated radionuclide inventories simply be left for future generations to deal with.
In March, Rick Perry, who was secretary of energy during President Trump’s first administration, observed that during his tenure at the Department of Energy it became clear to him that any plan to move SNF “required some practical consent of the receiving state and local community.”1
Chun-Sheng Chien, Shih-Jen Wang, Show-Chyuan Chiang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 161 | Number 3 | March 2008 | Pages 203-209
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT08-A3923
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The MAAP4 code is a fast-running severe accident analysis and management code widely used in nuclear industrial applications. It has been used as a severe accident analysis tool with which the timing of key events and source terms in the accident are assessed in Taiwan for many years. In the case of a loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA), it needs to know its break area and break elevation prior to reconstructing the accident for further analysis. For the system with more than one unknown parameter, it is not easy to identify these parameters since their tuning work becomes sophisticated.The purpose of this paper is to find a better solution for this problem by coupling an optimization module with the MAAP4 simulation code. In this paper, a recirculation line break LOCA of the Kuosheng nuclear power plant is cited as a reference case. Different recirculation line break areas are tested and verified. This optimization module coupled with the MAAP4 code can be used to identify the break elevation and area if the shroud water level drops below the break point.
