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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
S. Chaudhury, S. A. Ansari, P. K. Mohapatra, D. M. Noronha, J. S. Pillai, Ashutosh Srivastava, I. C. Pius
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 5 | May 2019 | Pages 727-735
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1510699
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Laboratory-scale studies were carried out to develop an analytical methodology for the processing of plutonium-bearing analytical laboratory waste at liter scale using hollow fiber–supported liquid membrane (HFSLM) technique by selective recovery of plutonium from uranium, americium, and other laboratory chemicals. In the first stage, uranium and plutonium were selectively transported from the feed to the receiver phase using 30% tri-n-butyl phosphate/n-dodecane which was used as the carrier in HFSLM. From the thus separated uranium and plutonium mixture, Pu(III) was selectively precipitated as ammonium plutonium(III)-oxalate [NH4Pu(C2O4)2 · 3H2O], leaving most of the uranium in the supernatant solution. A combination of HFSLM method followed by ammonium plutonium–oxalate precipitation is faster, gives lower radiation exposure to working personnel, and generates lesser volume of secondary waste as compared to traditional precipitation/ion-exchange technique. Furthermore, the present methodology signifies its importance in providing a very good yield of Pu recovery (>99%) from waste solution.