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Undeclared uranium hitches a ride on cobalt exports from Congo, study says
Philippe (left) and Manzuk quantified the amount of uranium that has been exported from the DRC in cobalt shipments or left behind in the environment. (Photo: Joel Hallberg/UW–Madison)
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Princeton University have published a study in Nature Communications that calls attention to a blind spot in nuclear nonproliferation: The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has exported thousands of metric tons of uranium, and there is no accounting for where it has gone.
In partnership with Lighthouse Reports and the Financial Times, UW–Madison nuclear engineering professor and nuclear security expert Sébastien Philippe and Ryan Manzuk, a geologist and research fellow in Philippe’s group and at Princeton, conducted the study using countrywide mineralization and geochemical data.
Kyoung-Ho Kang, Rae-Joon Park, Sang-Baik Kim, Seong-Wan Hong
Nuclear Technology | Volume 167 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 211-222
Technical Paper | NURETH-12 / Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A8863
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Sustained heating experiments, named Experiments on Late-phase coolant Injection to ASsess the mitigation of focusing effect of metallic layer (ELIAS), were performed to quantify the boiling heat removal rate at the upper surface of a metallic layer for precise evaluations on the effect of a late-phase in-vessel coolant injection. Heat fluxes from the melt layer to the water pool varied from 250 to 550 kW/m2 depending on the surface temperature of the metallic layer. Comparison of boiling heat fluxes between the ELIAS experiments and the calculation using Berenson's film boiling correlation shows that effective heat removal was accomplished via late-phase coolant injection in the ELIAS experiments. In this study, a simple model was developed to evaluate the mitigation of focusing effect in the metallic layer via late-phase coolant injection. The ELIAS experimental data on the heat transfer rate at the upper surface of the metallic layer were used as input data in the simple model. The calculation results for the large-break loss-of-coolant accident in the APR1400 show that the risk induced by the focusing effect is highly dependent on the metallic layer thickness and an enhanced integrity of the reactor pressure vessel could be achieved via late-phase coolant injection during this time period.