To ensure radiological safety margin in the transport and storage of spent nuclear fuel, it is crucial to perform source term and shielding analyses in advance from the perspective of conservation. When performing source term analysis on UO2 fuel, which is mostly used in commercial nuclear power plants, uranium and oxygen are basically considered to be the initial materials of the new fuel. However, the presence of impurities in the fuel and structural materials of the fuel assembly may influence the source term and shielding analyses. The impurities could be radioactive materials or the stable materials that are activated by irradiation during reactor power operation. As measuring the impurity concentration levels in the fuel and structural materials can be challenging, publicly available information on impurity concentration levels is used as a reference in this evaluation. To assess the effect of impurities, the results of the source term and shielding analyses were compared depending on whether the assumed impurity concentration is considered. For the shielding analysis, generic cask design data developed by KEPCO-E&C was utilized.
The process optimization of directed energy deposition (DED) has become imperative in the manufacture of reliable products. However, an energy-density-based approach without a sufficient powder feed rate hinders the attainment of an appropriate processing window for DED-processed materials. Optimizing the processing of DEDprocessed Ti-6Al- 4V alloys using energy per unit area (Eeff) and powder deposition density (PDDeff) as parameters helps overcome this problem in the present work. The experimental results show a lack of fusion, complete melting, and overmelting regions, which can be differentiated using energy per unit mass as a measure. Moreover, the optimized processing window (Eeff = 44~47 J/mm2 and PDDeff = 0.002~0.0025 g/mm2) is located within the complete melting region. This result shows that the Eeff and PDDeff-based processing optimization methodology is effective for estimating the properties of DED-processed materials.