ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
Latest Magazine Issues
Aug 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2026
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
August 2026
Latest News
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.
A. Bujan, B. Tóth, A. Bieliauskas, R. Zeyen, C. Housiadas
Nuclear Technology | Volume 169 | Number 1 | January 2010 | Pages 1-17
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9339
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Phébus FP tests study the phenomenology of severe accidents in water-cooled nuclear reactors. The first test, FPT0, was performed with fuel irradiated for only 1 week; the second test, FPT1, was performed with fairly similar boundary conditions but with irradiated fuel (burnup: 23 GWd/t). The objective of this work is, on the one hand, to summarize the main experimental results of these two tests concerning the behavior and transport of fission products and structural materials in the circuit and, on the other hand, to identify or to confirm any modeling weaknesses in the SOPHAEROS/ASTEC V1 module used for interpreting the experimental results. Besides comparison with available experimental data, the main results of the entire circuit analyses are compared with former SOPHAEROS/ASTEC V0 analyses and, for so-called quasi-separated steam generator tubes, with one- and two-dimensional Eulerian and Lagrangian (particle tracking) models.Concerning the transport of iodine vapor species, it is shown that the results obtained are compatible with passage of nonnegligible amounts of the measured highly volatile iodine through circuit to containment. It is also shown that these results depend heavily on the considered kinetics of Cd release from the bundle.