• Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology(JNFCWT)
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.233-244
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• 2008

A conceptual design study for a pyroprocesing facility, has been carried out in this study, which is available for the recovery of uranium and transuranic elemental group(TRU), that is, reusable as a nuclear fuel especially in a next generation-type reactor. The scale of this facility has been chosen as 20 kg HM/batch, comparatively small engineering size in order to collect scale-up data for the design of a commercial facility as well as to get operational experience. The spent fuel to be handled in this process is as follows : 3.5 % enriched uranium fuel, 35,000MWd/tU and 5-year cooled. The major items considered in the conceptual study are a building lay-out including various hot cells, safety management of the process operation in conjunction with material balance control, radiation safety, inert atmosphere control in shielded hot cells, and criticality control of uranium and TRU products.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.52 no.5
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• pp.1022-1028
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• 2020

One of the possible options for spent-fuel management in Korea is pyroprocessing, which is a process for electrochemical recycling of spent nuclear fuel. Nuclear material accountancy is considered to be a safeguards measure of fundamental importance, for the purposes of which, the amount of nuclear material in the input and output materials should be measured as accurately as possible by means of chemical analysis and/or non-destructive assay. In the present study, a neutron measurement system based on the fast-neutron energy multiplication (FNEM) and passive neutron albedo reactivity (PNAR) techniques was designed for nuclear material accountancy of a spent-fuel assembly (i.e., the input accountancy of a pyroprocessing facility). Various parameters including inter-detector distance, source-to-detector distance, neutron-reflector material, the structure of a cadmium sleeve around the close detectors, and an air cavity in the moderator were investigated by MCNP6 Monte Carlo simulations in order to maximize its performance. Then, the detector responses with the optimized geometry were estimated for the fresh-fuel assemblies with different ²³⁵U enrichments and a spent-fuel assembly. It was found that the measurement technique investigated here has the potential to measure changes in neutron multiplication and, in turn, amount of fissile material.