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Reduced Enrichment for Research and Test Reactors
Nuclear Science and Engineering Division at Argonne
U.S. Department of Energy

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Abstracts and Available Papers Presented at the
1996 International RERTR Meeting

SUPPLY OF ENRICHED URANIUM FOR RESEARCH REACTORS

Hans Müller, Jürgen Laucht

NUKEM GmbH
Fuel Services Division
Alzenau, Germany

ABSTRACT

Since the RERTR meeting in 1990 at Newport/USA, NUKEM recommended that the research reactor community agree upon a worldwide unified technical specification for low enriched uranium (LEU) and high enriched uranium (HEU) since there existed numerous specifications both from suppliers/fabricators and research reactors. The target recommended by NUKEM is to arrive at a worldwide unified standard specification in order to facilitate supplies of LEU and HEU to fabricators for fabrication of research reactor fuel elements.

In our paper presented at the RERTR meeting at Paris in September 1995, we pointed out that LEU and HEU supplied by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in the past was never 'virgin' material, i.e., it was mixed with reprocessed uranium. Our recommendation was to include this fact in the proposed unified specification. Since the RERTR meeting in 1995 progress on a unified standard specification has been made and we would like to provide more specific information about that in this paper.

Furthermore, we will deal with the question whether there is a secure supply of LEU for converted research reactors. We list current and potential suppliers of LEU, noting however, that the DOE has for a number of years been unable to supply any LEU due to production problems.

The future availability of LEU of U.S. origin is, of course, essential for those research reactor operators which have converted their reactors from HEU to LEU and which are intending to return spent fuel of U.S. origin to the U.S.A.


PDF version NOT available
An electronic copy of the full paper is not available at this time. If you would like to receive a copy of this paper, please contact the author.


Contact:
Mr. Jurgen Laucht
NUKEM GmbH
Fuel Services Division
D-63755 Alzenau, Industiestrasse 13
Germany
Tel.: +49-6023/91-1608
Fax: +49-6023/91-1600
E-mail: [email protected]

2016 RERTR Meeting

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2015 RERTR Meeting

The 2015 International RERTR Meeting (RERTR-2015) took place in Seoul, Korea on Oct. 11-14, 2015.
For more information visit RERTR-2015.

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Last modified on July 29, 2008 11:32 +0200