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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 8–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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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Latest News
Japan gets new U for enrichment as global power and fuel plans grow
President Trump is in Japan today, with a visit with new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on the agenda. Takaichi, who took office just last week as Japan’s first female prime minister, has already spoken in favor of nuclear energy and of accelerating the restart of Japan’s long-shuttered power reactors, as Reuters and others have reported. Much of the uranium to power those reactors will be enriched at Japan’s lone enrichment facility—part of Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd.’s Rokkasho fuel complex—which accepted its first delivery of fresh uranium hexafluoride (UF₆) in 11 years earlier this month.
Takuya Yamashita, Ikken Sato, Takeshi Honda, Kenichiro Nozaki, Hiroyuki Suzuki, Marco Pellegrini, Takeshi Sakai, Shinya Mizokami
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 10 | October 2020 | Pages 1517-1537
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1704581
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Estimation and understanding of the state of the fuel debris and fission products inside the plant comprise an essential step in the decommissioning of Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings’ Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station (1F). However, because of the plant’s high-radiation environment, direct observation of the plant interior is difficult. Therefore, in order to understand the plant’s interior conditions, comprehensive analysis and evaluation based on various measurement data from the plant, analysis of plant data during the accident progression phase, and information obtained from computer simulations for this phase are necessary. These evaluations can be used to estimate the conditions of the interior of the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) and the primary containment vessel (PCV). This paper addresses 1F Unit 2 as the subject to produce an estimated map of the fuel debris distribution from data obtained about the RPV and PCV based on comprehensive evaluation of various measurement data and information obtained from the accident progression analysis, which were released to the public in June 2018.