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The Other Energy Markets
Published in Anco S. Blazev, Global Energy Market Trends, 2021
Further processing produces highly enriched uranium, containing over 20% U-235, which is used in smaller reactors to power naval warships and submarines. Even further processing can yield weapons-grade uranium, which contains over 90% U-235, which is used for making nuclear weapons.
Nuclear and Hydro Power
Published in Anco S. Blazev, Energy Security for The 21st Century, 2021
Further processing produces highly enriched uranium, containing over 20% U-235, which is used in smaller reactors to power naval warships and submarines. Even further processing can yield weapons-grade uranium, which contains over 90% U-235, which is used for making nuclear weapons.
The Other Energy Sources
Published in Anco S. Blazev, Power Generation and the Environment, 2021
Further processing produces highly enriched uranium, containing over 20% U-235, which is used in smaller reactors to power naval warships and submarines. Even further processing can yield weapons-grade uranium which contains over 90% U-235 and is used for making nuclear weapons.
Improved Disposition of Surplus Weapons-Grade Plutonium Using a Metallic Pu-Zr Fuel Design
Published in Nuclear Technology, 2023
Braden Goddard, Aaron Totemeier
In addition to the PDR MCNP simulations, traditional oxide fuel simulations were performed for comparison. Three oxide fuel variants were simulated consisting of UO2 at 4.5% 235U enrichment, MOX with 4 wt% weapons-grade plutonium with the balance consisting of depleted uranium, and MOX with 5 wt% weapons-grade plutonium with the balance consisting of depleted uranium. All fuel isotopic compositions are shown in Table I. The external fuel cell dimensions modeled were the same as the PDR model, but the dimensions of the fuel rods differed. The cylindrical fuel region had a radius of 0.3922 cm, there was a fuel-cladding gap of 0.00785 cm, and the cladding thickness was 0.0572 cm. The cladding composition was that of Zircaloy-4 and the fuel-cladding gap was filled with helium.34,35 The density of the fuel region was 10.97 g/cm3 for both the UO2 and MOX compositions.37 All fuel compositions were burned to 44 000 MWd/tonne HM with the same time steps and k-code parameters as the Lightbridge MCNP simulations. The fuel and the fuel-cladding gap were modeled at 900 K, with the cladding and coolant modeled at 600 K.
A New Era of Nuclear Criticality Experiments: The First 10 Years of Radiation Test Object Operations at NCERC
Published in Nuclear Science and Engineering, 2021
Jesson Hutchinson, John Bounds, Theresa Cutler, Derek Dinwiddie, Joetta Goda, Travis Grove, David Hayes, George McKenzie, Alexander McSpaden, James Miller, William Myers, Ernesto Andres Ordonez Ferrer, Rene Sanchez, Travis Smith, Katrina Stults, Nicholas Thompson, Jessie Walker
Understanding the critical mass of nuclear material was of great importance during the Manhattan Project. In order to address this, integral experiments were performed at Los Alamos. Of primary interest were critical mass data on highly enriched uranium (HEU) and weapons-grade plutonium (WG Pu). These early experiments2–4 were the first measurements ever performed on large (kilogram) quantities of HEU and plutonium metal and are similar to many of the RTO experiments discussed in this work. On August 21, 1945, shortly after the end of World War II, Harry Daghlian was conducting hands-on experiments with a 6.2-kg sphere of -phase WG Pu reflected by tungsten carbide bricks.5 During the experiment, a brick slipped from his hand onto the assembly, resulting in a criticality accident that yielded a lethal dose of radiation to Daghlian. This resulted in moving these operations from Omega Canyon in Los Alamos to TA-18, a more remote area of the laboratory. A second criticality accident occurred on May 21 of the following year using the same plutonium core reflected by beryllium.5 These two accidents led to a requirement that any systems that have a reasonable chance of reaching criticality must be controlled remotely,6 ultimately leading to construction of several critical assembly machines and the establishment of LACEF (Ref. 7).
Incorporating uncertainty for enhanced leaderboard scoring and ranking in data competitions
Published in Quality Engineering, 2021
Lu Lu, Christine M. Anderson-Cook
Data were flexibly generated for a variety of different scenarios, and the inputs for these scenarios were chosen to mimic the breadth of urban environments seen in practice. The data were generated using a stochastic simulation code developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The input factors were divided into several categories: background, sources, and detector movement. For the background, multiple versions of urban streets were used with different configurations and compositions for the buildings and features. Five different radioactive source types were included, with an additional source being defined as a combination of two of the sources (99mTc + HEU). These sources range from weapons grade materials to isotopes common in medical or industrial applications: HEU: Highly enriched uraniumWGPu: Weapons grade plutonium131I: Iodine, a medical isotope60Co: Cobalt, an industrial isotope99mTc: Technetium, a medical isotopeA combination of HEU and 99mTc