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Undeclared uranium hitches a ride on cobalt exports from Congo, study says
Philippe (left) and Manzuk quantified the amount of uranium that has been exported from the DRC in cobalt shipments or left behind in the environment. (Photo: Joel Hallberg/UW–Madison)
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Princeton University have published a study in Nature Communications that calls attention to a blind spot in nuclear nonproliferation: The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has exported thousands of metric tons of uranium, and there is no accounting for where it has gone.
In partnership with Lighthouse Reports and the Financial Times, UW–Madison nuclear engineering professor and nuclear security expert Sébastien Philippe and Ryan Manzuk, a geologist and research fellow in Philippe’s group and at Princeton, conducted the study using countrywide mineralization and geochemical data.
S. W. Hong, Y. S. Na, S. H. Hong, J. H. Song
Nuclear Technology | Volume 196 | Number 3 | December 2016 | Pages 538-552
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT16-9
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Some advanced reactors adapt the in-vessel corium retention concept by cooing the outside wall of the reactor vessel in severe accidents. If a reactor vessel failure happens in this case, the molten corium in the reactor vessel is directly injected into the water in the reactor cavity without the process of a free fall. Experiments using ZrO2 and molten corium to simulate the conditions in which the reactor vessel is fully flooded were recently carried out at the Test for Real cOrium Interaction with water (TROI) experimental facility, and the results are compared with the data produced under conditions in which the reactor vessel is partially flooded. It was observed that the melt front velocity in the water under submerged reactor conditions is much faster than that under partially flooded reactor cavity conditions, and a large bubble was observed at the surface of the mixing zone under submerged reactor conditions. Accordingly, it is estimated that the breakup of the melt jet in the water during the fuel-coolant interaction (FCI) test under submerged reactor conditions would be different than that of the FCI test under partially flooded reactor cavity conditions.