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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 8–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Sellafield awards $6B ‘high hazard risk reduction’ framework contract
Sellafield Ltd., the site license company overseeing the decommissioning of the United Kingdom’s Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria, England, has awarded a 15-year framework contract worth up to £4.6 billion ($6 billion) to support “high hazard risk reduction programs” at the site.
Emilian Popov, Kaushik Banerjee (ORNL)
Proceedings | International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management 2019 (IHLRWM 2019) | Knoxville, TN, April 14-18, 2019 | Pages 33-38
This paper describes the fissile mass and concentration necessary for a critical event to occur outside containers disposed in a bedded salt repository. The criticality limits are based on modeling mixtures of water, salt, dolomite, concrete, rust, and fissile material using a neutron/photon transport computational code. Several idealized depositional configurations of fissile material in the host rock are analyzed: homogeneous spheres and heterogeneous arrangements of plate fractures in regular arrays. Deposition of large masses and concentrations are required for criticality to occur for low enriched 235U enrichment. Homogeneous mixtures with deposition in all the porosity are more reactive at high enrichments of 235U and 239Pu. However, unlike typical engineered systems, heterogeneous configurations can be more reactive than homogeneous systems at high enrichment when deposition occurs in only a portion of the porosity and the total porosity is small, because the relationship between the porosity of the fractures and matrix also strongly influences the results.