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...

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...

Bulk GaAs-based B coated detectors are under investigation as potential devices to assist in transmission analysis of spent nuclear fuel elements. The GaAs detectors are presently being investigated for their radiation hardness, neutron sensitivity and gamma ray insensitivity. The devices are to be used for evaluation, at first, with thermal neutrons, and later with 24 keV neutrons. Preliminary...

 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...

Semi-static dissolution tests using pressurized water reactor spent fuel rod segments and NNWSI reference J-13 well water 1n sealed stainless steel vessels at 85*C are being conducted In support of the Waste Package Task of the NNWSI Project. Test specimens include: bare fuel plus the empty cladding hulls, fuel rod segments with artificially induced cladding defects and water-tight end caps, an...

Because the spent fuel removed from a nuclear reactor is highly radioactive, it must be disposed of in a way that protects the environment from contamination and living organisms from exposure. Radioactive isotopes can be spread by air or water, and can also become part of the food chain. While the radioactivity of spent fuel drops with time, according to a 1995 National Academy of Sciences stu...

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...