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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.
Jennifer S. Butler, Darvin Kapitz, Robert P. Martin, Farrokh Seifaee, Ramu K. Sundaram
Nuclear Technology | Volume 170 | Number 1 | April 2010 | Pages 244-260
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 2008 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants / Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9462
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
AREVA NP's U.S. EPR is a 4590-MW(thermal) evolutionary pressurized water reactor that incorporates proven technology with an innovative system architecture to provide an unprecedented level of safety. One of the measures of safety is provided by probability risk assessment (PRA). PRA Level 1 concerns the evaluation of core damage frequency based on various initiating events and the success or failure of various plant event mitigation features. Determination of this measure requires mission success criteria, which are used to build the logic that makes up the fault trees and event trees of the Level 1 PRA. Developing mission success criteria for the wide variety of accident sequences modeled in the PRA Level 1 model requires a large number of thermal-hydraulic calculations. AREVA selected the MAAP4 code to perform these calculations because of its fast computation times relative to more sophisticated thermal-hydraulic codes. This is a unique application of the MAAP4 code, which was developed specifically for severe accident and PRA Level 2 analysis. As such, a study was performed to assess MAAP4's thermal-hydraulic response capabilities against AREVA's S-RELAP5 best-estimate integral systems thermal-hydraulic analysis code.