Response to Comments from Oak Ridge

R esponses to Industry Questions receive from the posting of the FRN

Comments from Reactor & Nuclear Safety Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Comment 1:

In Section C.1.1, Data On Permanently Discharged Fuel, the current form is requesting Lattice Type.  It appears that the form has been modified from previous years where an Assembly Type Code (e.g., B1515B2, W1717WL) used to be requested for each assembly and is no longer being requested.  There are numerous assembly types that can fall within a given Lattice type from a particular vendor.  It is very important to keep the assembly type code specification in the GC-859 database to properly characterize the fuel assembly attributes.  A new column should be added that captures the assembly type code specification or the lattice type drop down should contain the assembly type codes.

RESPONSE to Comment 1

Throughout the development of the new Form GC-859 survey, meetings and dialog were held among personnel from a number of Offices within the Department of Energy ( including the Energy Information Administration, the Office of the General Counsel, the Office of Nuclear Energy, and the Office of Environmental Management), the national laboratories, survey respondents, industry representatives, fuel vendors, data users, and contractors on the redesign of the Nuclear Fuel Data survey form and instructions. Representatives from the Reactor & Nuclear Systems Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory participated in these meetings. It was determined that the Assembly Type Codes collected in previous surveys would no longer be used. A separate effort would be conducted to obtain detailed fuel characteristics data directly from the fuel manufacturers and vendors. This would provide a more complete set of data on fuel types, at a level greater than that supplied by simply assigning fuel codes. This detailed fuel characteristics data would be more comprehensive than that data previously available in the Characteristics Data Base, compiled in the 1980’s.

Comment 2:

In Section B.3, is it possible to add a column that specifies thermal power produced (MW(th)) for that cycle?

RESPONSE to Comment 2

The DOE has determined that providing thermal power produced for each cycle would result in an excessive burden for the survey respondents. This decision was made in response to comments from respondents during the stakeholder meetings.

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