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MIT professor develops method to verify compliance with Outer Space Treaty
Danagoulian
Areg Danagoulian of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is proposing a mechanism for verifying that Earth-orbiting satellites are in compliance with the Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits the placement of nuclear weapons in space. Danagoulian’s “concept and feasibility study,” titled “Verification of the Outer Space Treaty with cosmic protons,” was published recently in the journal Nature.
Brandon Distler, Steve Baker, Jordan Gladden (Transware Enterprises), Hatice Akkurt (EPRI)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 925-930
Cask Loader, an EPRI software system is a relational database program that facilitates the automated selection of candidate spent fuel assemblies for placement into dry cask storage canisters from spent fuel pools. Cask Loader allows users to compute the decay heat values for an extended burnup range using a modified regulatory guidance approach. Due to increased efficiency in operation, the number of assemblies with higher burnups increased exponentially within the past two decades. The NRC Regulatory Guide 3.54, published in 1999, set applicability limits for burnup that are below the current operational experience. Subsequently, within the past decade, the need for extending the burnup ranges significantly increased. Only two measurement points are available for extended burnup range. Analyses were performed for these two points and extended by including additional typical and hypothetical PWR and BWR assemblies. For this study, decay heat values were computed using Cask Loader and ORIGEN and were then compared against each other. The computational results showed that compared to ORIGEN, Cask Loader overestimates the decay heat values without any exception and therefore can be considered conservative in its estimation of decay heat values for high burnup range. In this paper, the comparative decay heat values are presented.