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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.
Victor C. Leite, Roberto Schirru, Miguel Mattar Neto
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 5 | May 2019 | Pages 637-645
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1516056
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the main roles of the nuclear fuel bundle spacer grid (SG) is to safely support the fuel rods (FRs) through springs and dimples. The SG design is an important matter for nuclear power plant operation when a damaged FR could release fission products. For this work, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is applied to define the geometries of the springs and dimples existing in a SG. Other algorithms had been used to optimize these geometries but not PSO. This paper proposes a PSO variable model and its fitness function in order to define an optimized geometry for the spring and the dimple so that they can provide sufficient gripping forces and minimize stresses. The implemented PSO was able to generate geometries of springs and dimples with stresses minimized and with a specific required stiffness value. The results of these two characteristics are compared with other results in the literature. For further work, PSO will be used to optimize other important design characteristics of a SG: grid-to-rod fretting, coolant flow-induced vibration, and the function of mixing coolant.