The Korean government has strived to secure a disposal site for the safe management of radioactive waste since the early 1980s. The 249 th meeting of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) held in September 1998 established the “National Radioactive Waste Management Policy”, which aims at completing the construction of a Low and Intermediate Level Radioactive Waste (LILW) disposal facility by 2008,...

One of the key issues that has emerged in performing a probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) for the spent fuel pool during the decommissioning phase of a nuclear power plant's lifecycle is how much credit can be given to the operating staff to respond to an incident that impacts the spent fuel pool that would, if not attended to, lead to a loss of cooling of the spent fuel and eventually to a zi...

l%e partitioning and transmutation concept (P-T) has as a mission the reductio~ by many orders of rnagnitudq of certain undesirable nuclides in the waste streams. Given that only a very small fiction of spent fiel can be “rejected” by a P-T enterp~ a P-T system must therefore be capable of accommodating a wide range of spent fuel characteristics. Variability of nuclide composition (i.e. the fee...

Executive Summary Consideration of the depletion phenomena and isotopic uncertainties in burnup-credit criticality analysis places an increasing reliance on computational tools and significantly increases the overall complexity of the calculations. An automated analysis and data management capability is essential for practical implementation of large-scale burnup credit analyses that can be per...

Radiation induced dissolution of uranium dioxide (UO2) nuclear fuel and the consequent release of radionuclides to intruding groundwater are key-processes in the safety analysis of future deep geological repositories for spent nuclear fuel. For several decades, these processes have been studied experimentally using both spent fuel and various types of simulated spent fuels. The latter have been...

Fast reactor fuel cycle (FRFC) is regaining importance because of its vital role in the long term development of nuclear power. The safety issues associated with the fast reactors are now well understood and newer designs can address those from the lessons learned in the past. The same cannot be ascertained about their safeguards issues. Primary reason being the presence of special nuclear mate...

The direct measurement of plutonium in spent reactor fuel is an unmet challenge in international safeguards. In this simulation study, we investigate the use of the delayed gamma rays from fission product nuclei to determine the amount of fissile isotopes (Pu-239, Pu-241, and U-235) in irradiated light water reactor fuel assemblies. Fission is stimulated with an interrogating neutron source, an...

The paper addresses the problem of MOX-fuel self-protection during full cycle of MOX-fuel management. Under conditions of the closed LWR cycle the proliferation-resistance levels were evaluated for fresh and spent MOX-fuel with 231Pa and Cs feed. As it follows from the paper results, combination of these two admixtures being doped into MOX-fuel is able to enhance the inherent radiation barrier ...

The transmutation of spent nuclear fuel is considered as a prospective alternative concept to the current concept based on the non-reprocessed spent fuel disposal into underground repository. The Czech research and development programme in the field of partitioning and transmutation is founded on the Molten-salt Transmutation Reactor system concept with fluoride salts based liquid fuel, the fue...

Monitorovanie a únik testovanej WWER – 440 látky namočenej do vyčerpaného paliva zo skladu sústredenom na Slovensku An accelerated monitoring system designed for the Slovak wet interim spent fuel storage facility in NPP Jaslovské Bohunice bases on the newly designed “cesium detectors” is presented in the paper. Since 1999, leak tests of WWER-440 fuel assemblies are provided by a special leak ti...