An Assessment of Continued R & D into an Electrometallurgical Approach for Treating DOE Spent Nuclear Fuel (1995) / Chapter Skim
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3 THE DOE SPENT FUEL INVENTORY
3 THE DOE SPENT FUEL INVENTORY
Pages 25-34
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From page 25... ...
In 1992, He DOE began efforts to address He disposition of SNF arid to develop art integrated, longterm SNF management program. The DOE Spent Nuclear Fuel Program has produced a comprehensive database containing a detailed inventory of DOE-owned SNF, as well as a plan of action to resolve SNF vuInerabilities that have been identified.
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From page 26... ...
Issues being addressed include transportation, characterization, stabilization, interim storage, and technology development for ultimate storage. CATEGORIZATIONS OF SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL Historical Grouping Historically, for purposes of reprocessing and recovery, DOE SNFs have been grouped by enrichment level and by cladding and construction.
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Rival Fuels Naval fiaels are Rose developed and used for naval propulsion and for related R&D activities. Although its design is classified, naval fuel can be categorized as being composed of highly enriched uranium.
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5Spent Fuel Working Group Report on Inventory and Storage of the Department's Spent Nuclear Fuel and Other Reactor Irradiated Nuclear Materials and Their Environmental' Safety and Health Vulnerabilities (3 volumes)
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(Data from DOE Spent Nuclear Fuel Technology Integration Pleas, Department of Energy report SNF-PP-FS-002, December, 1994.)
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and N-reactor fuels are not suitable for direct geologic disposal, and even long-term interim storage would require repackaging or some other treatment.7 The principal goal for treating these fuels would be to put them into a safe and stable condition for interim storage until their ultimate disposition can be decided. Because the proposed Yucca Mountain repository cannot be available until after 2010, at the earliest, to receive any spent fuel consigned to geologic disposal, there is an unavoidable need to attend to these two categories of fuel (about 80% by mass of the DOE's total spent fuel inventory)
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From page 31... ...
ALTERNATIVE TECHNOLOGIES FOR TREATING DOE SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL At present, the most promising alternatives to the electrometallurgical approach for treating DOE's SNF are direct disposal and Purex. In addition, DOE is supporting development of several other approaches for converting SNF and other nuclear materials to forms suitable for disposal.
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From page 32... ...
However, the first of these reports, dealing with costs, was based on an assumed annual throughput of 1,500 MTU, which is much higher than needed for DOE SNF, and it noted that only limited economy of scale could be achieved for an electrometallurgical facility of that size. The second report indicated that the amounts of waste might be comparable for Purex and IFR processing but noted that estimates of waste generation "are very contingent upon assumptions..." and that "these results need fiercer review." A firm comparison between Purex and electrometallurgical processing is not possible because such a comparison would require demonstration of the latter process on a production scale, and indeed much of the development, including engineering and scale-up of the various unit processes, remains to be done.
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From page 33... ...
In contrast, scale-up of a Purex plant could benefit Mom economies of scale, but only a small Purex facility would be needed for processing DOE SNF. These considerations would further affect any cost comparison.
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