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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
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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
Framatome signs contracts with Sizewell C
French nuclear developer Framatome is slated to deliver key equipment for Sizewell C Ltd.’s two large reactors planned for the United Kingdom’s Suffolk coast.
The agreement, reportedly worth multiple billions of euros, was announced this week and will involve Framatome from the design phase until commissioning. The company also agreed to a long-term fuel supply deal. Framatome is 80.5 percent owned by France’s EDF and 19.5 percent owned by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.
Alexander Heifetz, Xin Huang, Roberto Ponciroli, Sasan Bakhtiari, Richard Vilim (ANL), Jafar Saniie (IIT)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 49-58
Transmission of information using elastic waves on existing metallic pipes provides an alternative communication option for a nuclear facility. The advantages of this approach consist of transmitting information through barriers, such as the containment building wall, and providing an option for nuclear facility physical cybersecurity. Ultrasonic carrier frequency elastic shear waves confined to a metallic pipe create a communication channel which is difficult to eavesdrop on without direct physical contact. Compared electric or fiber optic cables, the communication channel consisting of a thick nuclear-grade stainless steel pipe is resilient to physical damage, such as channel severing. In this paper, we discuss acoustic communication system design considerations, including data transmission requirements for a nuclear facility and transducer operating conditions. A viable candidate for acoustic communication channel is a chemical volume control system (CVCS) stainless steel pipe, which penetrates through the containment building wall. A laboratory bench-scale system consisting of a nuclear grade CVCS-like pipe and ultrasonic transducers was assembled for a preliminary communication system analysis. Because of low bandwidth and spectral dispersion of ultrasonic transducers, on off keying (OOK) protocol was chosen for data communication. Laboratory tests have shown the acoustic communication system to be resilient to low frequency noise, such as process noise at a nuclear facility. Amplitude shift keying (ASK) communication protocol was developed using GNURadio software environment, and demonstration of data transmission was performed using piezo-electric (PZT) and electromagnetic acoustic (EMAT) transducers. Main achievements thus far include demonstration of transmission of sound and text files with PZT and EMAT across six-foot long nuclear grade stainless steel pipe, and demonstration of image transmission with PZT over the pipe. In the former example, 32KB image was transmitted at 2Kb/s bitrate. Efforts are currently under way to further enhance data transmission rate.