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The busyness of the nuclear fuel supply chain
Ken Petersenpresident@ans.org
With all that is happening in the industry these days, the nuclear fuel supply chain is still a hot topic. The Russian assault in Ukraine continues to upend the “where” and “how” of attaining nuclear fuel—and it has also motivated U.S. legislators to act.
Two years into the Russian war with Ukraine, things are different. The Inflation Reduction Act was passed in 2022, authorizing $700 million in funding to support production of high-assay low-enriched uranium in the United States. Meanwhile, the Department of Energy this January issued a $500 million request for proposals to stimulate new HALEU production. The Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2024 includes $2.7 billion in funding for new uranium enrichment production. This funding was diverted from the Civil Nuclear Credits program and will only be released if there is a ban on importing Russian uranium into the United States—which could happen by the time this column is published, as legislation that bans Russian uranium has passed the House as of this writing and is headed for the Senate. Also being considered is legislation that would sanction Russian uranium. Alternatively, the Biden-Harris administration may choose to ban Russian uranium without legislation in order to obtain access to the $2.7 billion in funding.
Takeshi Tsukada, Keiju Takahashi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 162 | Number 2 | May 2008 | Pages 229-243
Technical Paper | First International Pyroprocessing Research Conference | doi.org/10.13182/NT08-A3951
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In pyrometallugical reprocessing, the spent electrorefiner salt containing fission product (FP) elements may be purified by zeolite and reused. Batch-type absorption tests were conducted using one or two FP chlorides in a LiCl-KCl eutectic electrolyte in order to obtain absorption isotherms to fit to a Langmuir equation model. For the trivalent FP elements in the one-component or two-component systems, the FP-element uptake in the zeolite can be related to its concentration in the salt using a single Langmuir-type equation. In contrast, for monovalent and divalent FP elements, it was necessary to use three different Langmuir-type equations. Using these derived absorption equations and a stage concentration diagram, it was found that only a three-stage process is required to attain a decontamination factor of 50 for trivalent FP elements via a countercurrent multistage process.