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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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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DOE-NE’s newest fuel consortium includes defense from antitrust laws
The Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy is setting up a nuclear fuel Defense Production Act Consortium that will seek voluntary agreements with interested companies “to increase fuel availability, provide more access to reliable power, and end America’s reliance on foreign sources of enriched uranium and critical materials needed to power the nation’s nuclear renaissance.” According to an August 22 DOE press release, the plan invokes the Defense Production Act (DPA) to give consortium members “defense from antitrust laws when certain criteria are met” and “allow industry consultation to develop plans of action.” DOE-NE is looking for interested companies to join the consortium ahead of its first meeting, scheduled for October 14.
Sarah Miele, Pranav Karve, Sankaran Mahadevan (Vanderbilt Univ), Vivek Agarwal (INL)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 976-982
In this work, we investigate the suitability of a novel dynamics-based method, namely vibroacoustic modulation (VAM), for the detection and localization of cracks caused by the alkali-silica reaction (ASR). ASR is a chemical reaction between the cement and certain aggregates containing amorphous silica. In a VAM test, the structural component is excited using two frequencies. The frequency modulation (and hence the nonlinear structural behavior) appears as sidebands around the higher (probing) frequency in the linear spectrum (LS) of the measured response in the neighborhood of the damage zone. A map of the magnitude of such sidebands can be used to detect and localize the damage [1]. We perform laboratory experiments to investigate VAM-based damage diagnosis in thick concrete components. We describe laboratory testing on a cement slab containing four pockets of reactive aggregates placed at known locations. Our experiments show that VAMbased testing with optimized test parameters and suitable sensor density can potentially be used to detect and localize cracks in thick concrete structures.