A. Add to your map the following:
(1) the 2016 world mining production, by country, indicating ton U/year. Calculate and report on your map approximate U consumption per year from all the plants operating in 2016, by country. Use the burn-up values and thermal efficiency provided in Chapter 1 of Tsoufanidis, and the power output values that you have from the data that is already on your map. Include in the text of your post details of your calculations: equations used, assumptions, input values.
(2) the 15 largest uranium-producing mines in the world – show their location on the map, and label them with mine name, operator, and tonU/year production rate.
(3) show on your map all of the U.S. operating uranium mines, and indicate their production rate (in 2016), type, name and operator.
(4) Show the conversion plants.
(5) Show the deconversion plants.
(6) Map the enrichment capacity, by country, and show SWU/year, location of enrichment sites, name of company that operates it, and type of enrichment.
The following links will give you most of the information you need, but you’ll need to do a bit of additional research on your own. Include with your map citations for all of the data sources you used, indicating which information came from which source.
- World Nuclear Association (WNA): US Mining. World mining production. World mines.
- WNA: Conversion and deconversion.
- WNA: Enrichment.
- International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) + Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA): Uranium Resources
B. Activity calculations
- Calculate the activity of U-238, in Ci/g of U-238.
- Calculate the activity of U-235, in Ci/g of U-235.
- Calculate the activity of U-235 in Ci/g of natural uranium.
C. Flow Diagram for Uranium Fuel
Recreate the Pigford flow diagram that indicates waste streams from the mining, milling, conversion, enrichment, conversion and fabrication. (i.e. stop with the your last stream being “fabricated fuel.”) You will find that there are minor inconsistencies in the numbers reported in this diagram; I expect that you will correct these inconsistencies in your recreation of the diagram. Note: MT = metric ton = ton = 1000 kg = 10^6 g. Separately of the diagram, show all of your calculations (equation used, assumptions, inputs).
(1) Make sure to appropriately track the uranium inventory, reporting it in ton U and Ci for each of the streams.
(2) Similarly, track the material inventories of Rn-222, Th-230, and Ra-226 – you can report their quantities in Ci. Indicate also the amounts of each of these three isotopes in the ore (first stream). indicate also the activity of U in the ore.
(3) why are the other daughters of U-238 not reported in this flow diagram?
Due: Friday 16 Feb, 8am.
Make a post of your blog with the material you would like me to grade. Upload source files on Box – sometimes I’m able to give you more credit if I go into your source files and see more of your work.
D. General Feedback:
- Great job projecting your maps; most of you fixed this issue.
- An areal feature (e.g. a value for a whole country) should not be displayed as a point. You can use a point in ArcMap to get the label that you want to appear, but it is misleading to depict a quality of a whole country as one point. Consider removing the point next to the value and adding the country name near the value to increase clarity.
- While many students added a north arrow and this extra effort is appreciated, it is actually cartographically inaccurate to use a north arrow on the global scale. This is because, in most map projections, North changes based on where you are on the map. Picturing a globe might help to understand this. An easy solution is to add a graticule (lat/long grid) which is available as a shapefile via Natural Earth Data.
- Please remember to submit your assignments as high-resolution .png, .jpg, or .pdf so that they are able to assessed accurately.