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Latest News
Radium sources yield cancer-fighting Ac-225 in IAEA program
The International Atomic Energy Agency has reported that, to date, 14 countries have made 14 transfers of disused radium to be recycled for use in advanced cancer treatments under the agency’s Global Radium-226 Management Initiative. Through this initiative, which was launched in 2021, legacy radium-226 from decades-old medical and industrial sources is used to produce actinium-225 radiopharmaceuticals, which have shown effectiveness in the treatment of patients with breast and prostate cancer and certain other cancers.
Mark D. DeHart, Zain Karriem, Michael A. Pope
Nuclear Technology | Volume 201 | Number 3 | March 2018 | Pages 247-266
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1322451
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A conceptual low-enrichment uranium (LEU) fuel design has been developed for the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) at Idaho National Laboratory. The ATR is currently fueled with a high-enrichment fuel but is slated to be converted to LEU under programs led by the National Nuclear Security Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy. A conceptual LEU fuel design, the Enhanced LEU Fuel (ELF), has been developed assuming power peaking control through the use of variable fuel meat thicknesses and no use of burnable poison. In initial work, this design was shown to satisfy performance requirements for ATR operation. Following these design calculations, a safety analysis process was initiated to demonstrate that the ELF design would successfully meet safety limits for postulated accident conditions. Those calculations, performed using RELAP5 and ATR-SINDA, require physics analysis to provide spatial power distributions and kinetics parameters for various core operations configurations. This article describes the findings of the physics analysis and provides predictions for the behavior of a LEU-fueled version of ATR, and compares these to calculations of the performance of the current high-enrichment uranium fuel.