Visualizing Nuclear Fuel Inventories

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I was working on characterizing the used nuclear fuel in the United States and needed to calculate the isotopic inventories for 174,000 fuel assemblies. This seemed like an overwhelming project and decided to see if using a database could help me. With the help of the online lessons from Software Carpentry I was able to write a Python script that would run the needed information and then store the results in a Sqlite database. I then used an open source tool RapidMiner to visual that data:

(Image taken from Wagner et al, "Categorization of Used Nuclear Fuel Inventory in Support of a Comprehensive National Nuclear Fuel Cycle Strategy", ORNL/TM-2012/308.)