• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.43 no.4
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• pp.335-342
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• 2011

As part of the Department of Energy's Fuel Cycle Research and Development Program an electrochemical technology employing molten salts is being developed for recycle of metallic fast reactor fuel and treatment of light water reactor oxide fuel to produce a feed for fast reactors. This technology has been deployed for treatment of used fuel from the Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II) in the Fuel Conditioning Facility, located at the Materials and Fuel Complex of Idaho National Laboratory. This process is based on dry (non-aqueous) technologies that have been developed and demonstrated since the 1960s. These technologies offer potential advantages compared to traditional aqueous separations including: compactness, resistance to radiation effects, criticality control benefits, compatibility with advanced fuel types, and ability to produce low purity products. This paper will summarize the status of electrochemical development and demonstration activities with used nuclear fuel, including preparation of associated high-level waste forms.

• Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology(JNFCWT)
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.339-350
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• 2007

Status on the spent nuclear fuel management policy and R&D plan of the major countries is surveyed. Also the prospect of the future R&D plan is suggested. Recently so-called fuel cycle nations, which have the reprocess policy of the spent fuel, announced new spent fuel management policy based on the advanced fuel cycle technology. The policy is focused to transmute highly radioactive material and material having a very long half-life, and to recycle the Pu and U contained in the spent fuel. In this way the radio-foxily of the spent fuel as well as the amount of the high level waste to be eventually disposed can greatly be reduced. Most of countries selected the wet process as a primary option for the treatment of the spent fuel since the advanced wet process, which is based on the existing PUREX process, looks more feasible as compared with the dry process. The wet process, however, is much more sensitive in terms of proliferation-resistance compared with the dry process. The pure Pu can easily be obtained by simply modifying the process. On the other hand the pure Pu can not be extracted in the dry process based on the high temperature molten salt process such as a pyroprocess. Even though the pyroprocess technology is very premature, it has a great merit. Thus it is necessary for Korea to have a long term strategy for pursuing a spent fuel treatment technology with a proliferation resistance and a great merit for the GEN-IV fuel cycles. Pyroprocess is one of the best candidates to satisfy these purposes.

• Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology(JNFCWT)
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.175-180
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• 2004

In order to vitrify the combustible dry active waste (DAW) generated from Korean Nuclear Power Plants, a glass formulation development based on waste composition was performed. A borosilicate glass, DG-2, was formulated to vitrify the DAW in an induction cold crucible melter (CCM). The processability, product performance, and volume reduction effect of the candidate glass were evaluated using a computer code and were measured experimentally in the laboratory and CCM. The glass viscosity and electrical conductivity as the process parameters were in the desired ranges. Start-up and maintaining glass melt of the candidate glass were favorable in the CCM. The product of the glass product such as chemical durability, phase stability, and density was satisfactory. The vitrification process using the candidate glass was also evaluated assuming that it was operated as economically as possible.

• 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.53 no.1
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• pp.253-257
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• 2021

This work demonstrates the use of baromembrane method based on reverse osmosis (RO) process. The method is realized on mobile complex, which allows to concentrate and determine ultra-low activity of radionuclides in water cooling ponds of Russian nuclear fuel cycle enterprises. The existence level of radionuclide background creates difficult conditions for identification the contribution of liquid discharges enterprise, as standard monitoring methods have a very high detection level for radionuclides. Traditional methods for determining the background radionuclides concentrations require the selection of at least 500 liters (l) of water, followed by their evaporation to form a dry residue. This procedure with RO membranes requires at least 5 days. It is possible to reduce the time and energy spent on evaporation of hundreds of water liters by pre-concentrating radionuclides in a smaller sample volume with baromembrane method. This approach allows preliminary concentration of water samples from 500 l volume till 20 l volume during several hours. This approach is universal for the concentration of dissolved salts of any heavy metals, other organic compounds and allows the preparation of water countable samples in much shorter time compared to the traditional evaporation method.