Supporting HALEU fuel cycle availability for domestic research, demonstration, and commercial deployment.
The DOE/NRC Collaboration for Criticality Safety Support for Commercial-Scale HALEU Fuel Cycles and Transportation (DNCSH) is developing the necessary data to support the commercial use of high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU.
About DNCSH
About DNCSH
Demand for HALEU is growing as advanced reactors move toward deployment and existing reactors seek performance improvements.
The DNCSH project is developing publicly available benchmarks relevant to HALEU fuel forms, geometries, moderators, absorbers, and operating conditions. Funded through congressional direction and aligned with recent executive orders on advanced nuclear deployment, the effort will reduce uncertainty, support regulatory review in collaboration with the NRC, and help enable safe, scalable HALEU fuel cycles.
U.S. Department of Energy Awards $17 Million for First Round of HALEU Criticality Benchmarking Projects
U.S. Department of Energy Awards $17 Million for First Round of HALEU Criticality Benchmarking Projects
Awarded projects to support the licensing and regulation of HALEU – a crucial material needed to demonstrate and deploy advanced nuclear reactors.
Program Goals
The DNCSH effort will review various reactor driven fuel cycles, their criticality safety impacts, other methods and data needs, and issue targeted calls for proposals in order to:
- Enable higher throughput fuel cycle processes.
- Enable higher capacity transportation package designs.
- Reduce licensing uncertainty by enabling quality industry submissions through publicly available data, and
- Reduce requests for additional information from NRC to industry related to nuclear data, code validation, and criticality safety.
