• Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology(JNFCWT)
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.203-212
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• 2019

Disposal nonconformity of radioactive wastes refers to radioactive wastes that need to be treated, solidified and packaged during operation or decommissioning of NPPs, and are typically exemplified by particulate radioactive wastes with dispersion characteristics. These wastes include the dried powders of concentrated wastes generated in the process of operating NPPs, slurry and sludge, various powdered wastes generated in the decommissioning process (crushed concrete, decontamination sludge, etc.), and fine radioactive soil, which is not easy to decontaminate. As these particulate wastes must be packaged so that they become non-dispersive, they are solidified with solidification agents such as cement and polymer. If they are treated using existing solidification methods, however, the volume of the final wastes will increase. This drawback may increase the disposal cost and reduce the acceptability of disposal sites. Accordingly, to solve these problems, this study investigates the pelletization of particulate radioactive wastes in order to reduce final waste volume.

• Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology(JNFCWT)
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.245-251
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• 2016

Soil can be contaminated by radioactive materials due to nuclide leakage following unexpected situations during the decommissioning of a nuclear power plant. Soil decontamination is necessary if contaminated land is to be reused for housing or industry. The present study classifies various soil remediation technologies into biological, physics/chemical and thermal treatment and analyzes their principles and treatment materials. Among these methods, this study selects technologies and categorizes the economics, applicability and technical characteristics of each technology into three levels of high, medium and low by weighting the various factors. Based on this analysis, the most applicable soil decontamination technology was identified.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.10
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• pp.3949-3956
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• 2022

Kori Unit 1 is planning a system decontamination project to reduce radiation exposure of decommissioning workers, prevent the spread of contamination and down-grade the level of classification of radioactive waste. The system decontamination range for Kori Unit 1 will be the entire primary system, including RCS, CVCS and RHRS. Some system design modifications are required for the system decontamination operation. In this paper, major system design modifications were evaluated based on the conditions that system restoration is needed after completion of system decontamination. The major system design modifications are CIDF connection location to system, system decontamination operating pressure control, RCP seal water injection and formation of letdown flow. It was evaluated that there was no negative effect on the system due to the system design modifications. However, as the RCP seal water is injected into the system in the oxidation process, the concentration of the oxidizing agent is diluted. Therefore, the oxidizing agent injection and system decontamination operation procedures should be developed to address the dilution effect of the oxidizing agent. The system design modifications dealt in this paper will be finally confirmed through on-site investigation in the future, and if necessary, the system design modifications will be re-evaluated.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.8
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• pp.2742-2746
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• 2023

The corrosion behavior of copper immersed in dilute oxychloride solution (100 mM) was studied through surface investigation and in-situ monitoring of open-circuit potential. The copper corrosion was initiated with copper dissolution into a form of CuCl^-₂, resulting in mass decrease within the first 40 h of immersion. This was followed by a hydrolysis reaction initiated by the CuCl^-₂ at the copper surface, after which oxide products were formed and deposited on the surface, resulting in a mass increase. The formation of nucleation sites for copper oxide and its lateral extension during the corrosion process were examined using focused ion beam (FIB)-scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The presence of metastable compounds such as atacamite (CuCl₂·3Cu(OH)₂) on the corroded copper surface was revealed by X-ray photoelectron spectra (XPS) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM)-energy dispersive spectrometry (EDS) analysis.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.11
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• pp.3996-4004
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• 2022

The data collected by the In-Situ Decommissioning (ISD) sensors are time-specific, age-specific, and developmental stage-specific. Research has been done on the stream data collected by ISD testbed in the recent few years to seek both frequent episodes and abnormal frequent episodes. Frequent episodes in the data stream have confirmed the daily cycle of the sensor responses and established sequences of different types of sensors, which was verified by the experimental setup of the ISD Sensor Network Test Bed. However, the discovery of abnormal frequent episodes remained a challenge because these abnormal frequent episodes are very small signals and may be buried in the background noise of voltage and current changes. In this work, we proposed Advanced Data Analytics (ADA) methods that are applied to the baseline data to identify frequent episodes and extended our approach by adding more features extracted from the baseline data to discover abnormal frequent episodes, which may lead to the early indicators of ISD system failures. In the study, we have evaluated our approach using the baseline data, and the performance evaluation results show that our approach is able to discover frequent episodes as well as abnormal frequent episodes conveniently.

• Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology(JNFCWT)
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.329-334
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• 2006

The depth distributions of total $^3H$ and $^{14}C$ activities were characterized for the activated shielding concrete from a decommissioning of KRR-2 using the commercially available tube furnace and a liquid scintillation counter. The correlation of measurement results between $^3H,\;^{14}C$ and gammer emitter was evaluated to apply for estimating radionuclide inventory of the concrete waste generated from decommissioning KRR-2. The detection limits for $^3H$ and $^{14}C$ are 0.048 and 0.028 Bq/g respectively. The specific activities of the $^3H$ and $^{14}C$ tend to decrease exponentially as the depth of the concrete becomes deeper from the surface. In addition, the $^3H$ and $^{14}C$ activities were in good correlation with the $^{60}CO$ activities analysed for the shielding concrete of KRR-2.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.41 no.8
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• pp.1079-1086
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• 2009

A great volume of radioactive concrete is generated during the operation and the decommissioning of nuclear facilities. The washing-electrokinetic technology in this study, which combined an electrokinetic method and a washing method, was developed to decontaminate the concrete generated in nuclear facilities. The results of only an electrokinetic decontamination for the concrete showed that cobalt was removed to below 1% from the concrete due to its high pH. Therefore, the washing-electrokinetic technology was applied to lower the pH of the concrete. Namely, when the concrete was washed with 3 M of hydrochloric acid for 4 hours (0.17 day), the $CaCO_3$ in the concrete was decomposed into $CO_2$ and the pH of the concrete was reduced to 3.7, and the cobalt and cesium in the concrete were removed by up to 85.0% and 76.3% respectively. Next, when the washed concrete was decontaminated by the electrokinetic method with 0.01M of acetic acid in the 1L electrokinetic equipment for 14.83 days, the cobalt and the cesium in the concrete were both removed by up to 99.7% and 99.6% respectively. The removal efficiencies of the cobalt and cesium by 0.01M of acetic acid were increased more than those by 0.05M of acetic acid due to the increase of the concrete zeta potential. The total effluent volume generated from the washing-electrokinetic decontamination was 11.55L (7.2ml/g).

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.66-70
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• 2017

Radioactive materials are used in medicine, non-destructive testing, and nuclear plants. Source localization is especially important during nuclear decommissioning and decontamination because the actual location of the radioactive source within nuclear waste is often unknown. The coded-aperture imaging technique started with space exploration and moved into X-ray and gamma ray imaging, which have imaging process characteristics similar to each other. In this study, we simulated $21{\times}21$ and $37{\times}37$ coded aperture collimators based on a modified uniformly redundant array (MURA) pattern to make a gamma imaging system that can localize a gamma-ray source. We designed a $21{\times}21$ coded aperture collimator that matches our gamma imaging detector and did feasibility experiments with the coded aperture imaging system. We evaluated the performance of each collimator, from 2 mm to 10 mm thicknesses (at 2 mm intervals) using root mean square error (RMSE) and sensitivity in a simulation. In experimental results, the full width half maximum (FWHM) of the point source was $5.09^{\circ}$ at the center and $4.82^{\circ}$ at the location of the source was $9^{\circ}$. We will continue to improve the decoding algorithm and optimize the collimator for high-energy gamma rays emitted from a nuclear power plant.

• Korean Journal of Mineralogy and Petrology
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.25-39
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• 2022

This study was conducted to evaluate the manufacturing process of non-sintered cement for the safe containment of radioactive waste using low level or ultra-low level radioactive waste soil generated from nuclear-decommissioning facilities, clay minerals, and blast furnace slag (BFS) as an industrial by-product recycling and to characterize the products using mineralogical and morphological analyses. A stepwise approach was used: (1) measuring properties of source materials (reactants), such as waste soil, clay minerals, and BFS, (2) manufacturing the non-sintered cement for the containment of radioactive waste using source materials and deducing the optimal mixing ratio of solidifying and adjusting agents, and (3) conducting mineralogical and morphological analyses of products from the hydration reactions of manufactured non-sintered cement solidifier (NSCS) containing waste concrete generated from nuclear-decommissioning facilities. The analytical results of NSCS using waste soil and clay minerals confirmed none of the hydration products, but calcium silicate (CSH) and ettringite were examined as hydration products in the case of using BFS. The compressive strength of NSCS manufactured with the optimum mixing ratio and using waste soil and clay minerals was 3 MPa after the 28-day curing period, and it was not satisfied with the acceptance criteria (3.44 MPa) for being brought in disposal sites. However, the compressive strength of NSCS using BFS was estimated to be satisfied with the acceptance criteria, despite manufacturing conditions, and it was maximized to 27 MPa at the optimal mixing ratio. The results indicate that the most relevant NSCS for the safe containment of radioactive waste can be manufactured using BFS as solidifying agent and using waste soil and clay minerals as adsorbents for radioactive nuclides.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.297-304
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• 2018

U.S. nuclear power plant decommissioning guidelines(MARSSIM and MARLAP) are recommends to use DQOs when planning and conducting site surveys. The DQOs which is constructed in the site survey planning stage provide a way to make the best use of data. It helps we can get the important information and data to make decisions as well. From fifth to seventh steps of DQOs are the process of designing a site survey by using the collected data and information in the previous step to make reasonable and reliable decisions. The gray region that is set up during this process is defined as the range of concentrations where the consequences of type II decision errors are relatively small. The gray region can be set using DCGL and the average concentration of radionuclide in the sample collected at the survey unit. By setting up the gray region, site survey plan can be made most resource-efficient and the consequences on decision errors can be minimized. In this study, we set up the gray region by using the DCGL of Kori-1 which was derived from the previous research. In addition, we proposed a method to assess the concentration of radionuclide in samples for making decisions correctly.