Search results for "Nuclear fuel"

Antineutrino monitoring of spent nuclear fuel

2016

Military and civilian applications of nuclear energy have left a significant amount of spent nuclear fuel over the past 70 years. Currently, in many countries world wide, the use of nuclear energy is on the rise. Therefore, the management of highly radioactive nuclear waste is a pressing issue. In this letter, we explore antineutrino detectors as a tool for monitoring and safeguarding nuclear waste material. We compute the flux and spectrum of antineutrinos emitted by spent nuclear fuel elements as a function of time, and we illustrate the usefulness of antineutrino detectors in several benchmark scenarios. In particular, we demonstrate how a measurement of the antineutrino flux can help to…

2019

Final disposal of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) from nuclear power plants (NPPs) is an ethical issue with implications within and across generations. We address this issue from the perspective of nuclear communities that host nuclear waste disposal sites. These are primarily the communities that face injustice due to the potential radiological risks. A resident survey (n = 454) was conducted in two Finnish nuclear communities, i.e. Eurajoki and Pyhajoki, that are being considered as alternative sites for a second repository for SNF. The nuclear waste management (NWM) company Posiva is already building a repository in Eurajoki, the first in Finland. These communities are in different stages of th…

Building future nuclear power fleets: The available uranium resources constraint

2013

Abstract According to almost all forward-looking studies, the world′s energy consumption will increase in the future decades, mostly because of the growing world population and the long-term development of emerging countries. The effort to contain global warming makes it hard to exclude nuclear energy from the global energy mix. The availability of natural uranium resources is a major constraint in terms of meeting this demand. In line with the scenarios floated by various international organisations and taking into consideration only current uranium-consuming light water reactors technologies with slow neutrons, 4 to 7 Mt of uranium could be consumed by 2050, namely, all identified or know…

Nuclear community considering threats and benefits of final disposal. Local opinions regarding the spent nuclear fuel repository in Finland.

2012

This paper focuses on local opinion regarding the siting of a spent nuclear fuel repository in the municipality of Eurajoki, Finland. The research question is how the residents perceive the final disposal. The analysis showed that positive perceptions regarding spent nuclear fuel siting issues are more likely to be found among men and more affluent residents, which can be viewed as an indication of the ‘white male effect’. Contrastingly, women and less-advantaged people are more likely to resist the disposal of spent nuclear fuel in ‘their backyard’. Two approaches, ‘nuclear oases’ and ‘industry awareness’, are used to interpret the findings.

New measurement of the 242Pu(n,γ) cross section at n_TOF

2016

The use of MOX fuel (mixed-oxide fuel made of UO2 and PuO2 ) in nuclear reactors allows substituting a large fraction of the enriched Uranium by Plutonium reprocessed from spent fuel. With the use of such new fuel composition rich in Pu, a better knowledge of the capture and fission cross sections of the Pu isotopes becomes very important. In particular, a new series of cross section evaluations have been recently carried out jointly by the European (JEFF) and United States (ENDF) nuclear data agencies. For the case of 242 Pu, the two only neutron capture time-of-flight measurements available, from 1973 and 1976, are not consistent with each other, which calls for a new time-of flight captu…

A ROOT-based analysis tool for measurements of neutron-induced fission products at the IGISOL facility

2012

For the sustainable development of nuclear energy, the handling of used nuclear fuel is a key issue. Innovative fuel cycles are being developed for the transmutation of minor actinides and long-lived fission products. In view of these developments, accurate knowledge of the fuel inventory is necessary. The IGISOL facility with JYFLTRAP, at the accelerator laboratory of the University of Jyvaskyla, will be used to measure independent fission yield distributions from neutron-induced fission on different actinides. In this paper, an analysis tool is developed, using the CERN-based ROOT Data Analysis Framework, with the objective of performing full data analysis within the same code. The analys…

The $^{144}$Ce source for SOX

2015

International audience; The SOX (Short distance neutrino Oscillations with BoreXino) project aims at testing the light sterile neutrino hypothesis. To do so, two artificials sources of antineutrinos and neutrinos respectively will be consecutively deployed at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) in close vicinity to Borexino, a large liquid scintillator detector. This document reports on the source production and transportation. The source should exhibit a long lifetime and a high decay energy, a requirement fullfilled by the (144)Ce-(144)Pr pair at secular equilibrium. It will be produced at FSUE “Mayak” PA using spent nuclear fuel. It will then be shielded and packed according t…

Fuel for commercial politics: the nucleus of early commercial proliferation of atomic energy in three acts

2020

Historical research into the nuclear industry has focussed upon military and commercial aspects of the technology whilst ignoring fuel. This article discusses nuclear fuel, the resource at the centre of the industry and the role superpower politics played in its supply. Starting with the context of superpower competition, we examine the spread of nuclear technology from its beginnings in post-war Britain via West Germany in the 1950s to Finland in the 1960s and 1970s. We demonstrate that each country had varied interests affecting the choice of nuclear fuel for early energy projects; British fuel choices were constrained by its weapons programme and Germany needed legitimacy in the face of …

Radiative neutron capture on 242Pu in the resonance region at the CERN n_TOF-EAR1 facility

2018

The spent fuel of current nuclear reactors contains fissile plutonium isotopes that can be combined with uranium to make mixed oxide (MOX) fuel. In this way the Pu from spent fuel is used in a new reactor cycle, contributing to the long-term sustainability of nuclear energy. However, an extensive use of MOX fuels, in particular in fast reactors, requires more accurate capture and fission cross sections for some Pu isotopes. In the case of 242Pu there are sizable discrepancies among the existing capture cross-section measurements included in the evaluations (all from the 1970s) resulting in an uncertainty as high as 35% in the fast energy region. Moreover, post-irradiation experiments evalua…

Helium Behavior in Oxide Nuclear Fuels: First Principles Modeling

2010

UO2 and (U,Pu)O2 solid solutions (the so-called MOX) nowadays are used as commercial nuclear fuels in many countries. One of the safety issues during the storage of these fuels is related to their self-irradiation that produces and accumulates point defects and helium therein. We present density functional theory (DFT) calculations for UO2, PuO2 and MOX containing He atoms in octahedral interstitial positions. In particular, we calculated basic MOX properties and He incorporation energies as functions of Pu concentration within the spin-polarized, generalized gradient approximation (GGA) DFT calculations. We also included the on-site electron correlation corrections using the Hubbard model …