President Hassan Rouhani has declared that Iran’s nuclear industry is advancing at a faster pace, as one of his senior cabinet officials warned the country could ramp its uranium enrichment to 20 percent on short notice, if the United States withdraws from the nuclear agreement. Aljazeera.com

Namibian President Hage Geingob on Monday strongly denied corruption accusations stemming from a French anti-corruption probe centred on the purchase of Canadian mining company Uramin by French nuclear giant Areva. Enca.com

South Africa’s decision on the nuclear programme is likely to be clarified in the next two weeks when Minister of Energy Jeff Radebe briefs Parliament on whether it’s officially off the table or not. Iol.co.za

 

       Most nuclear reactors are powered by pellets of uranium or uranium mixed with plutonium. The pellets are inserted into long thin fuel rods which are then bundled together into fuel assemblies. When fuel assemblies are removed from a reactor, they are placed in a cooling pool for five years to allow heat and radioactivity to dissipate. When the assemblies are removed from the pool, they are stored in massive stainless steel and concrete containers known as dry casks which can hold between twenty and thirty fuel rod assemblies.

       Once a dry cask is sealed, there is currently no way to know how many fuel rod assemblies are actually stored in the cask because it cannot be opened once sealed. This is of grave concern to individuals and organizations who are working on insuring the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. It would be possible for a country to claim that there were more spent fuel rod assembles in their dry casks than were actually in the casks. The missing fuel rod assemblies could be diverted to a nuclear weapons facility for recycling and recovery of U-235 and/or plutonium.

       Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico under the leadership of Matthew Durham have developed a method for checking on the contents of dry casks without opening them. Their method relies on monitoring the path through the dry casks of muons generated by cosmic rays. They say that International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors could use the process that LANL researchers have developed to make sure that spent nuclear fuel is not being diverted to a nuclear weapons program.

      The LANL process requires muon monitors to be placed on either side of a dry casks. The muons will easily penetrate the concrete and steel of the casks but their paths through the casks will be influenced by the presence of heavy elements such as uranium and plutonium.

       The team set up a test cask at the Idaho National Laboratory. The test cask has twenty-four slots that can receive spent fuel rod assemblies. For the test, six of the twenty-four slots were left empty. Previous tests had suggested that the angle of muon scattering was influenced by missing fuel rod assemblies, but the area of the cask tested was too small for the tests to be conclusive.

       In the new experiments conducted by the LANL team, sensors were placed all over the test casks in nine different patterns. They found that they could accurately determine when two or more fuel rod assemblies were absent. They say that if they increase measurement time or use larger detectors that can capture more of the passing muons, it should be possible to tell if only one fuel rod assemble is missing.

       Considering that the cooling pools at nuclear power plants are quickly filling up, more and more spent fuel rod assemblies will be placed in temporary dry casks storage to await the construction of permanent geological repositories. The new muon monitoring system will be a valuable addition to the tools of nuclear plant inspectors.

 

 

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has approved the issuance of combined construction and operating licenses (COLs) for the two proposed AP1000 reactors at Florida Power and Light’s (FPL’s) Turkey Point plant in Florida. The utility has yet to make a final decision on whether to proceed with building the units. World-nuclear-news.org

Japan’s Toshiba announced today that it has completed the sale to Brookfield of its shareholding in Toshiba Nuclear Energy Holdings (US) Inc – the indirect holding company of Westinghouse Electric Company. The sale is independent of Brookfield’s acquisition of Westinghouse and some of its affiliates. World-nuclear-news.org

Activists protest Holtech’s proposed nuclear waste storage facility near Carlsbad, N.M. currentargus.com

Terrestrial Energy USA and Energy Northwest have agreed a memorandum of understanding on the terms of the possible siting, construction and operation of an Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR) at a site at the Idaho National Laboratory in southeastern Idaho. Nextbigfuture.com

 

 

 

 

       Nuclear power reactors are fueled with fuel rod assemblies. The fuel rods in the assemblies are long and thin. They are filled with pellets of enriched uranium or a mixture of uranium and plutonium. The rods are coated with an alloy of zirconium. There are problems with the coating currently used because, at high temperatures, the coating can allow flammable hydrogen gas to escape and might cause explosions. There is a great deal of research into better coatings for fuel rods.

         Most metals other than gold will oxidize when exposed to air and water. This process results in rust on an iron surface, tarnish on a silver surface and verdigris on copper and brass surfaces. This process can contribute to a category of failure referred to as stress corrosion cracking. There are three elements that form an oxide that can prevent any further oxidation: aluminum oxide, chromium oxide, and silicon dioxide.

        A team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) led by graduate student Yang Yang just published a paper this week that describes their work with thin layers of solid aluminum oxide coating on metals. These layers of oxide can deform like a liquid which allows them to fill in cracks and gaps that may form in the metal surface they coat. The researchers say that one of the most important potentials uses for the new solid oxide coats is in the coating of nuclear fuel rods. The new coating could prevent the escape of hydrogen gas molecules as the fuel rods age.

      The team examined metals coated with solid layers of aluminum oxide, chromium oxide and silicon dioxide with an environmental transmission electron microscope. The microscope allowed the team to examine metal surfaces exposed to gases and liquids such as oxygen and water. They found that these oxides coatings can prevent further oxidation to the surface of the metal.

       Only the aluminum oxide flowed like a liquid at room temperatures. In order to flow, the layer of aluminum oxide has to be just two or three billionths of a meter thick. The researchers found that the aluminum oxide coating could be stretched to more than double its original length while still preventing cracks to open in the metal surface. When this coating is present, the typical corrosion process in absent.

       The press release from the MIT team said, “Even with a solid protective layer, cracks can form that allow the oxygen to penetrate to the bare metal surface, where it can then penetrate into interfaces between the metal grains that make up a bulk metal material, causing further corrosion that can penetrate deeper and lead to structural failure.” However, the thin aluminum oxide coating “…is almost as deformable as a comparably thin layer of aluminum metal — a layer much thinner than aluminum foil. When the aluminum oxide is coated onto a surface of a bulk piece of aluminum, the liquid-like flow keeps the aluminum covered with its protective layer.” 

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A plan to use costly treated wastewater to fix Florida Power & Light’s nuclear cooling canals could wind up polluting Biscayne Bay, environmentalists warned this week. Miamiherald.com

Public utility JEA is on the hook for hundreds of millions more than originally planned under a nuclear power contract, according to an annual financial disclosure CEO Paul McElroy presented to City Council on Thursday. The municipal utility agreed in 2008 to purchase power from a planned dual reactor power plant in Waynesboro, Georgia. McElroy was the company’s chief financial officer at the time. News.wjct.org

The Southwest Research Institute has signed a pair of deals with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission that continues research work on nuclear processes and waste disposal. The first deal, worth $52 million and announced Wednesday, continues the San Antonio research and development group’s work as the operator of the Center for Nuclear Waste Regulatory Analyses. Expressnews.com

The recent assertion by Japan’s top diplomat that North Korea is preparing for a new nuclear weapons test has drawn a rebuttal from a U.S.-based monitoring website maintaining that such activity is not confirmed by satellite imagery. Asia.nikkei.com

 

 

 

 

Foreign Minister Taro Kono of Japan got a scathing reaction from the international community over his call to not be taken in by North Korea’s latest charm offensive. Asahi.com

Cyprus says it will lodge protests over the construction of Turkey’s first nuclear power plant a few dozen kilometers from the east Mediterranean island nation. Washingtonpost.com

Russia’s Rosatom has completed concreting the foundation of unit 1 of the Rooppur nuclear power plant in Bangladesh. ASE Group, a subsidiary of the Russian state nuclear corporation, said today the project to build the Asian country’s first nuclear power unit was on schedule. World-nuclear-news.org

Nuclear energy is not coming to Turkey quickly. ahvalnews2.com