Used Nuclear Fuel Cask Monitoring
Parker Allen, Shyam Upadhyay, Ben Yoder
Monitoring spent nuclear fuel inside dry storage casks is an important aspect of national security. Additionally, with advances in spent fuel reprocessing technology, the fuel stored in dry storage casks may become viable for reuse. Current casks are designed to store spent fuel while ensuring that the temperature and radiation produced by the fuel are contained without plans to reopen the cask. Our work aims to design a method to non-destructively monitor spent nuclear fuel inside dry storage casks, which would provide useful information about the fuel sealed in the cask without having to open it. This work specifically investigates incorporating two forms of monitoring into the spent fuel cask – gamma ray spectroscopy to monitor the integrity and composition of the fuel and muon tomography to image the fuel. In this design report, the use of gamma ray spectroscopy and muon tomography as spent fuel monitoring systems is analyzed.
Plasma Processing of Iron Ore
Dilan Kurukulasuriya, Ben Duban, Matthew Schau
Iron is currently produced using a carbon-based smelting process, leading to a large amount of CO2 production. The over 3 billion tonnes of CO2 generated by the steel industry makes it the largest contributor to global carbon emissions, at an average 8% per year. With steel demand expected to increase by around 30% by 2050, it is important to find whatever steps within the process that can be decarbonized. The main reaction occurring within the smelting process is some combination of reactions between iron, oxygen, and carbon. To rid this reaction of the carbon input, a hydrogen plasma is proposed to facilitate the reaction. Instead of a CO2 product, this leads to H2O production. The exchange of a greenhouse gas for an environmentally unproblematic molecule in water vapor seems to be a beneficial trade. The process in which this occurs will be explored in this design project.
