Feasibility of Direct Disposal of Salt Waste from Electochemical Processing of Spent Nuclear Fuel (original) (raw)
Related papers
Geological Disposal of Nuclear Waste: a Primer
Elements, 2016
The back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle has become the Achilles Heel of nuclear power. After more than 50 years of effort, there are, at present, no operating nuclear waste repositories for the spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants or for the high-level waste from the reprocessing of spent fuel. This issue describes the status of geological disposal in salt, crystalline rock, clay, and tuff, as presently developed in five countries.
Chapter 11: Chemistry/Electrochemistry of Spent Nuclear Fuel as a Wasteform
2013
Mineralogical Association of Canada Short Course 43, Winnipeg MB, May 2013, p. xx-xx INTRODUCTION The direct disposal of spent nuclear fuel in geologic repositories, built several hundred metres underground, has been under consideration internationally for 20 to 30 years. Various geologic formations are being, or have been, studied including tuff rock, salt domes, sedimentary clay deposits and granitic rock. The spent nuclear fuel would be encapsulated and sealed within a metallic container, most likely carbon steel possibly with an outer Cu shell and emplaced in bore holes or deposition tunnels within the repository. The space between the container and the borehole/tunnel wall would then be backfilled with sealing materials such as clays and clay/sand mixtures. A schematic illustrating the Canadian concept for disposal in crystalline rock is shown in Figure 11-1. This arrangement constitutes a multiple barrier system, Figure 11-2, including the engineered barriers (1, 2, and 3), ...
Establishing the Technical Basis for Disposal of Heat-Generating Waste in Salt
FCRD-UFD-2013-000233 SAND2013-6212P Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory managed and operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000. DISCLAIMER This information was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an agency of the U.
Deep Geological Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Waste
Handbook of Research on Advancements in Environmental Engineering
Management of Spent Nuclear Fuel (SF) and High-Level Waste (HLW) is one of the most important and challenging problems of the modern world. Otherwise a clean, cheap, constant, and secure way to produce electricity, nuclear power plants create large amounts of highly hazardous waste. Repositories—deep Geological Disposal Facilities (GDF)—for these types of waste must prevent radionuclides from reaching the biosphere, for up to 1,000,000 years, migrating from a deep (more than 300m), stable geological environment. At present, there are no operating GDFs for SF and/or HLW, mostly due to the difficult and complex task of preparing safety cases and licensing. The purpose of this chapter is to validate the generic R&D activities in this area and present alternative concepts of Radioactive Waste (RW) management: retrievability, reversibility, regional GDFs, long-term storage, and deep borehole disposal, demonstrating the main engineering tasks in solving the problem of RW management and di...
Disposal of High-Level Nuclear Waste in Deep Horizontal Drillholes
Spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste can be disposed in deep horizontal drillholes in sedimentary, metamorphic, or igneous rocks. Horizontal drillhole disposal has safety, operational, and economic benefits: The repository is deep in the brine-saturated zone far below aquifers in a reducing environment of formations that can be shown to have been isolated from the surface for millions of years; its depth provides safety against inadvertent intrusion, earth¬quakes, and near-surface perturbations; it can be placed close to the reactors and interim storage facilities, minimizing transportation; disposal costs per ton of waste can be kept substantially lower than for mined repositories by its smaller size, reduced infrastructure needs, and staged imple¬mentation; and, if desired, the waste could be retrieved using “fishing” technology. In the proposed disposal concept, corrosion-resistant canisters containing unmodified fuel assemblies from commercial ...
1985
NOTICE TO READERS At the request of the Salt Repository Project Office (SRPO), Argonne National Laboratory carried out a review of a Westinghouse Electronic Corporation report entitled "Waste Package Reference Conceptual Designs for a Repository in Salt," WTSD-TM-001, revision A*. This report includes designs for: the reference defense high level waste form from the Savannah River Plant; an optimized commercial high level waste form; and, spent fuel which has been disassembled and compacted into a circular bundle. It has provided a sound basis for the development of the advanced waste package conceptual design. Specific instructions were provided to the review panel. The panel also reviewed the document from a broad point of view. Valuable comments were provided by the panel. Resolution of the comments and recommendations are included in Appendix C of this report.
The Salt Defense Disposal Investigations (SDDI): Current Status and Future Plans - 14486
2014
Results are presented from simulations performed in support of the Salt Defense Disposal Investigations (SDDI), a field test designed to confirm the behavior of bedded salt as a geologic disposal medium for defense high-level waste (HLW) and DOE-managed spent nuclear fuel (SNF), emplaced on disposal room floors and shielded with run of mine salt. Recent activities in the following areas are summarized: radioactive waste inventory and heat load projections; potential repository design options; and current status of the field test project. We conclude that there is a continued need for research into the potential performance of a repository for heat-generating waste in bedded salt and a need to better understand the integrated response of the salt at the field scale. In particular, it is important to investigate the evolution of the small but non-negligible quantities of water within the salt as the heat from radioactive decay diffuses into the surrounding geologic medium. Recent coup...
Molten salt reactor waste and effluent management strategies: A review
Nuclear Engineering and Design, 2019
Molten salt reactors (MSRs) are being considered as one of the potential nuclear options to meet future energy demands. While the MSR designs are drastically different from the more traditional light water reactor, many of the waste streams are similar between the concepts. The purpose of this paper is to outline strategies for the treatment and processing of MSR-type wastes from concepts of reconditioning and recycle of certain components to partitioning and direct immobilization of other waste components. To help bridge science and technology gaps, knowledge gained from similar efforts such as pyroprocessing of Experimental Breeder Reactor II salt wastes can be leveraged to develop concept-to-disposition pathways. 2 LiF-BeF 2 salt (LeBlanc, 2010; Serp et al., 2014). The reactor utilized a high-Ni alloy to limit corrosion (i.e., Hastelloy-N, also called INOR-8 or Allvac N) (McCoy and McNabb, 1972).