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WIPP: Lessons in transportation safety
As part of a future consent-based approach by the federal government to site new deep geologic repositories for nuclear waste, local communities and states that are considering hosting such facilities are sure to have many questions. Currently, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico is the only example of such a repository in operation, and it offers the opportunity for state and local officials to visit and judge for themselves the risks and benefits of hosting a similar facility. But its history can also provide lessons for these officials, particularly the political process leading up to the opening of WIPP, the safety of WIPP operations and transportation of waste from generator facilities to the site, and the economic impacts the project has had on the local area of Carlsbad, as well as the rest of the state of New Mexico.
Gwendolyn J. Chee, Roberto E. Fairhurst Agosta, Jin Whan Bae, Robert R. Flanagan, Anthony M. Scopatz, Kathryn D. Huff
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 2 | February 2021 | Pages 182-203
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1753444
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The present U.S. nuclear fuel cycle faces challenges that hinder the expansion of nuclear energy technology. The U.S. Department of Energy identified four nuclear fuel cycle options that make nuclear energy technology more desirable. Successfully analyzing the transitions from the current fuel cycle to these promising fuel cycles requires a nuclear fuel cycle simulator that can predictively and automatically deploy fuel cycle facilities to meet user-defined power demand. This work introduces and demonstrates the demand-driven deployment capabilities in Cyclus, an open-source nuclear fuel cycle simulator framework. User-controlled capabilities such as time-series forecasting algorithms, supply buffers, and facility preferences were introduced to give users tools to minimize power undersupply in a transition scenario simulation. The demand-driven deployment capabilities are referred to as d3ploy. We demonstrate the capability of d3ploy to predict future commodities’ supply and demand, and automatically deploy fuel cycle facilities to meet the predicted demand in four transition scenarios. Using d3ploy to set up transition scenarios saves the user simulation setup time compared to previous efforts that required a user to manually calculate and use trial and error to set up the deployment scheme for the supporting fuel cycle facilities.