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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.
Jun Li, Man-Sung Yim, David McNelis
Nuclear Technology | Volume 162 | Number 3 | June 2008 | Pages 293-307
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT08-A3957
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The development of a fuzzy logic-based barrier (FLB) method for the evaluation of the proliferation resistance of nuclear fuel cycle systems is described in this paper. The method is based on using a group of system-dependent, measurable, or quantifiable variables to define the proliferation barrier effectiveness of a system as fuzzy numbers. The usefulness of the FLB method and the resulting metric in quantifying the proliferation resistance of fuel cycle systems was also investigated by applying it to three fuel cycles, i.e., light water reactor-once-through, light water reactor with mixed oxide fuel, and direct use of spent pressurized water reactor fuel in CANDU reactor. To address the issue of subjectivity in assigning barrier weighting factors or fuzzy numbers, the sensitivity of the results to the definition of fuzzy numbers and weighting schemes was also investigated.