Monitoring Spent or Reprocessed Nuclear Fuel Using Fast Neutrons

Cost analysis of the US spent nuclear fuel reprocessing facility

a r t i c l e i n f o The US Department of Energy is actively seeking ways in which to delay or obviate the need for additional nuclear waste repositories beyond Yucca Mountain. All of the realistic approaches require the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. However, the US currently lacks the infrastructure to do this and the costs of building and operating the required facilities are poorly es...

Partitioning and Transmutation of Spent Nuclear Fuel by Peacer

Challenges of managing long-living spent nuclear fuel wastes are to be technically overcome by a partitioning and transmutation system named as PEACER that is an abbreviation of its design goals: Proliferation-resistant, Environment-friendly, Accident-tolerant, Continuable and Economical Reactor. PEACER has been developed to manage spent nuclear fuels by uniquely combining Pb-Bi cooled critical...

Costs of Reprocessing Versus Directly Disposing of Spent Nuclear Fuel

Chemistry/electrochemistry of Spent Nuclear Fuel as a Wasteform

 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 an...

Minimizing the Repository Volume for Spent Nuclear Fuel

When minimizing the size of the spent nuclear fuel repository, two parameters are important: the required total number of canisters and distance between neighbouring canisters (the canister array pitch). If the latter is kept fixed, the Canister Filling Problem arises. On the other hand, if the former is assumed minimal, we come across the Alternative Canister Filling Problem. Both problems are...