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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
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver 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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Latest News
Dragonfly, a Pu-fueled drone heading to Titan, gets key NASA approval
Curiosity landed on Mars sporting a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) in 2012, and a second NASA rover, Perseverance, landed in 2021. Both are still rolling across the red planet in the name of science. Another exploratory craft with a similar plutonium-238–fueled RTG but a very different mission—to fly between multiple test sites on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon—recently got one step closer to deployment.
On April 25, NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) announced that the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s icy moon passed its critical design review. “Passing this mission milestone means that Dragonfly’s mission design, fabrication, integration, and test plans are all approved, and the mission can now turn its attention to the construction of the spacecraft itself,” according to NASA.
Fausto Franceschini, Bojan Petrovic
Nuclear Technology | Volume 167 | Number 3 | September 2009 | Pages 362-370
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9076
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
IRIS is a 335-MW(electric) pressurized water reactor (PWR) with integral primary system. Its design and optimized maintenance are compatible with long cycles, up to 4 yr. Advanced fuel management techniques are employed to support this objective; among others, novel use of burnable absorbers is considered. Erbium is one absorber that is currently utilized in PWRs. It has many desirable properties that ideally suit the extended cycle and low soluble boron concentration targeted by IRIS. However, erbium also leads to a cycle length penalty due to incomplete depletion and residual absorber isotopes, plus uranium displacement following erbium incorporation in the fuel matrix. This paper proposes to consider modifying the isotopic composition of erbium, evaluates its impact, and demonstrates that it is possible to obtain a considerable reduction of the penalty while retaining the positive features of natural erbium fuel. The economic benefit of the reduced penalty is appealing for the industrial production of isotopically modified erbium fuel.
