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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.
Vinay Kumar, Lalit Singh, A. K. Tripathi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 197 | Number 1 | January 2017 | Pages 20-28
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT16-89
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Any risk in safety-critical or control applications may lead to catastrophic disaster; hence, safety is a primary concern for such applications. The impact of risk varies from minor inconvenience and cost to personal injury, significant economic loss, and death. Therefore, a safety assessment process should be an inherent part of the system development process to make a system safe or to ensure that the effects from failures are minimized. This paper deals with a new probabilistic approach to quantify the safety of safety-critical systems (SCSs) and control systems based on probabilistic safety assessment to deal with the shortcomings of the existing techniques. The methodology has been tested on 29 operational data sets to validate its effectiveness. This paper demonstrates the methodology on the digital feedwater controller system of a nuclear power plant. The results indicate that the method can identify possible hazards and quantify such hazards of a SCS.