2. Nuclear fuel consists of fuel pins that are stacks of uranium oxide or mixed uranium plutonium oxide (MOX) cylindrical ceramic pellets, with diameters of 8–15 mm, that are encapsulated in metallic tubes. The fuel pins are grouped together in fuel assemblies. Each fuel assembly can be handled as a single entity, thus simplifying the fuelling and defuelling of reactors and the subsequent handl...

Sweden has been intensively developing methods for long-term storage of spent fuel from nuclear power plants for twenty-five years. A dedicated research program has been initiated and managed by the Swedish company SKB (Swedish Nuclear Fuels and Waste Management Co.) in collaboration with many research groups in different countries. After the interim storage, SKB plan to encapsulate the spent n...

An isotopic fingerprinting method is presented to determine the origin of unknown nuclear material with forensic importance. Spent nuclear fuel of known origin has been considered as the 'unknown' nuclear material in order to demonstrate the method and verify its prediction capabilities. The method compares, using factor analysis, the measured U, Pu isotopic compositions of the 'unknown' materi...

Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), along with other national laboratories, has been developing a solvent extraction process for partitioning of spent fuel constituents to lead to safer and cheaper disposal of high-level waste. The process, known as UREX+, separates key radionuclides from dissolved spent fuel into: (1) uranium for disposal as LLW, (2) technetium for disposal as HLW, (3) iodine f...

3. System 14. Document Identifier DOE Spent Nuclear Fuel CAL-DSD-NU-000007 Rev OOA 5. Title Intact and Degraded Mode Criticality Calculations for the Codisposal of ATR Spent Nuclear Fuel in a Waste Package 6. Group Criticality 7. Document Status Designation I8J Preliminary 0 Final 0 Cancelled 8. NotesJComments This document does not impact any other organization outside Criticality, therefore a...

In 2003, the Swiss parliament decided to introduce a 10-year moratorium on the export of spent fuel for reprocessing which started in July 2006. Before the start of the moratorium, the utilities were free to choose between reprocessing and direct disposal of the spent fuel. The Nuclear Energy Act states a series of conditions which must be fulfilled for an authorisation of the export of spent f...

The instant release fraction of a spent nuclear fuel is a matter of concern in the performance assessment of a deep geological repository since it increases the radiological risk. Corrosion studies of two different spent nuclear fuels were performed using bicarbonate water under oxidizing conditions to study their instant release fraction. From each fuel, cladded segments and powder samples obt...

The presented article deals with the description of a numerical model of a corridor at a Central Interim Spent Fuel Storage Facility (hereinafter CISFSF). The model takes into account the effect of air flows on the temperature of stored waste. The computational model was implemented in the ANSYS/CFX programming environment in the form of a CFD task solution, which was compared with an approxima...