scholarly journals Mission Impossible? Socio-Technical Integration of Nuclear Waste Geological Disposal Systems

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 4390 ◽  
Author(s):  
François Diaz-Maurin ◽  
Rodney Ewing
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Waste ◽  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Spent Nuclear Fuel ◽  
Systems Approach ◽  
High Level Waste ◽  
Integrated Analysis ◽  
Fissile Material ◽  
Radioactive Materials ◽  
Geological Disposal

We present a new perspective on geological disposal systems for nuclear waste. Geological disposal systems encompass all the processes required for the permanent isolation of highly-radioactive materials from humans and the biosphere. Radioactive materials requiring geological disposal are created by commercial nuclear power plants, research reactors, and defense-related nuclear activities, such as spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors and high-level waste from reprocessing to reclaim fissile material for weapons. We show that disposal systems are so complex that new methods of representation are required. Despite the common call for a systems approach, a broader perspective is needed to obtain an integrated view of disposal systems. We introduce a conceptual formalism of geological disposal systems based on a multi-scale integrated analysis approach. This ‘metabolic’ representation allows one to account for the technical complexity of disposal systems in relation to their broader societal context. Although the paper is conceptual, the integrated formalism can improve the understanding of the complexity of disposal systems and their policy requirements by connecting technical solutions with societal constraints. However, the paper also reveals the limits to efforts to integrate technical and social dimensions of geological disposal systems into a single formalism.

Deep Geological Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Waste

2015 ◽  
pp. 367-399
Author(s):  
Želimir Veinović ◽  
Biljana Kovačević Zelić ◽  
Dubravko Domitrović
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Fuel ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Spent Nuclear Fuel ◽  
High Level Waste ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Geological Disposal ◽  
Long Term Storage ◽  
Deep Geological Disposal ◽  
Safety Cases ◽  
High Level

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 disposal.

Thorium MSR as a Small-Scale Energy Source: Opportunities for Japan

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takashi Kamei
Keyword(s):  
Power Plant ◽  
Nuclear Power Plant ◽  
Nuclear Fuel ◽  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Spent Nuclear Fuel ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Fissile Material ◽  
Implementation Capacity

Even after the huge impact of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, Japan has to establish its energy supply system satisfying requirements of both global warming and resistibility of natural disaster. Nuclear power has a potential to reduce carbon emission but large-scale and centralized nuclear power plant may lose large volume of electricity supply at once. Small-scale nuclear power plants will bring solution in Japan. Thorium molten-salt reactor (MSR) is selected to simulate implementation capacity of small reactors in Japan. In order to use thorium as nuclear fuel, fissionable isotope is indispensable since natural thorium does not include fissile material. Japan owns plutonium in spent nuclear fuel of uranium usage. Quantitative evaluation of implementing capacity of thorium MSR in Japan by using plutonium accumulated in Japan. Implementation capacity of thorium MSR will be about 38 GWe and 11.2 GWe in the maximum and minimum cases at 2050, respectively.

Transport of MOX Fuel: A Continuous Challenge

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Je´roˆme Galtier
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Fuel ◽  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Spent Nuclear Fuel ◽  
Fuel Cycle ◽  
Nuclear Industry ◽  
Spent Fuel ◽  
Radioactive Materials ◽  
Mox Fuel ◽  
Increasing Demand

For 45 years TN International has been involved in the radioactive materials transportation field. Since the beginning the spent nuclear fuel transportation has been its core business. During all these years TN International, now part of AREVA, has been able to anticipate and fulfill the needs for new transport or storage casks designed to fit the nuclear industry evolutions. A whole fleet of casks able to transport all the materials of the nuclear fuel cycle has been developed. In this presentation we will focus on the casks used to transport the fresh and used MOX fuel. To transport the fresh MOX BWR and PWR fuel, TN International has developed two designs of casks: the MX 6 and the MX 8. These casks are and have been used to transport MOX fuel for French, German, Swiss and in a near future Japanese nuclear power plants. A complete set of baskets have been developed to optimize the loading in terms of integrated dose and also of course capacity. MOX used fuel has now its dedicated cask: the TN112 which certificate of approval has been obtained in July 2008. This cask is able to transport 12 MOX spent fuel elements with a short cooling time. The first loading of the cask has been performed in September 2008 in the EDF nuclear power plant of Saint-Laurent-des-Eaux. By its continuous involvement in the nuclear transportation field, TN International has been able to face the many challenges linked to the radioactive materials transportation especially talking of MOX fuel. TN International will also have to face the increasing demand linked to the nuclear renaissance.

scholarly journals Needs of countries with longer timescale for deep geological repository implementation

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 22
Author(s):  
Bálint Nős
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
High Level Waste ◽  
Deep Geological Repository ◽  
Spent Fuel ◽  
International Consensus ◽  
Geological Disposal ◽  
Geological Repository ◽  
Deep Geological Disposal ◽  
High Level

Countries operating nuclear power plants have to deal with the tasks connected to spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste management. There is international consensus that, at this time, deep geological disposal represents the safest and most sustainable option as the end point of the management of high-level waste and spent fuel considered as waste. There are countries with longer timescale for deep geological repository (DGR) implementation, meaning that the planned date of commissioning of their respective DGRs is around 2060. For these countries cooperation, knowledge transfer, participation in RD&D programmes (like EURAD) and adaptation of good international practice could help in implementing their own programmes. In the paper the challenges and needs of a country with longer implementation timescale for DGR will be introduced through the example of Hungary.

Removal of 90Sr from highly Na+-rich liquid nuclear waste with a layered vanadosilicate

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 1857-1865 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuvo Jit Datta ◽  
Peter Oleynikov ◽  
Won Kyung Moon ◽  
Yanhang Ma ◽  
Alvaro Mayoral ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Fuel ◽  
Nuclear Waste ◽  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Spent Nuclear Fuel ◽  
Continuous Operation ◽  
Fuel Rods ◽  
Nuclear Fuel Rods ◽  
Rich Liquid ◽  
Liquid Wastes

Capture of trace amounts (parts per trillion or ppt level) of 90Sr from highly Na+-rich (5 M or 115 000 parts per million) liquid wastes produced from reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel rods is crucial for continuous operation of nuclear power plants.

Operating Reliability Assessment of FPGA-Based NPP I&C Systems: Approach, Technique and Implementation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene Babeshko ◽  
Ievgenii Bakhmach ◽  
Vyacheslav Kharchenko ◽  
Eugene Ruchkov ◽  
Oleksandr Siora
Keyword(s):  
Integrated Circuits ◽  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Failure Modes ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Systems Approach ◽  
Reliability Assessment ◽  
Design Stage ◽  
Fpga Design ◽  
Operating Reliability

Operating reliability assessment of instrumentation and control systems (I&Cs) is always one of the most important activities, especially for critical domains like nuclear power plants (NPPs). Intensive use of relatively new technologies like field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in I&C which appear in upgrades and in newly built NPPs makes task to develop and validate advanced operating reliability assessment methods that consider specific technology features very topical. Increased integration densities make the reliability of integrated circuits the most crucial point in modern NPP I&Cs. Moreover, FPGAs differ in some significant ways from other integrated circuits: they are shipped as blanks and are very dependent on design configured into them. Furthermore, FPGA design could be changed during planned NPP outage for different reasons. Considering all possible failure modes of FPGA-based NPP I&C at design stage is a quite challenging task. Therefore, operating reliability assessment is one of the most preferable ways to perform comprehensive analysis of FPGA-based NPP I&Cs. This paper summarizes our experience on operating reliability analysis of FPGA based NPP I&Cs.

NUCLEAR WASTE MANAGEMENT IN SPAIN: ANALYSIS OF THE CURRENT SITUATION AND ALTERNATIVE STRATEGIES

10.6036/10156 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 355-358
Author(s):  
Pablo Fernández Arias ◽  
DIEGO VERGARA RODRIGUEZ
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Waste ◽  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Nuclear Power Plants ◽  
Spent Fuel ◽  
Nuclear Waste Storage ◽  
Alternative Strategies ◽  
Temporary Storage ◽  
Long Term Storage ◽  
High Level

Centralized Temporary Storage Facility (CTS) is an industrial facility designed to store spent fuel (SF) and high level radioactive waste (HLW) generated at Spanish nuclear power plants (NPP) in a single location. At the end of 2011, the Spanish Government approved the installation of the CTS in the municipality of Villar de Cañas in Cuenca. This approval was the outcome of a long process of technical studies and political decisions that were always surrounded by great social rejection. After years of confrontations between the different political levels, with hardly any progress in its construction, this infrastructure of national importance seems to have been definitively postponed. The present research analyzes the management strategy of SF and HLW in Spain, as well as the alternative strategies proposed, taking into account the current schedule foreseen for the closure of the Spanish NPPs. In view of the results obtained, it is difficult to affirm that the CTS will be available in 2028, with the possibility that its implementation may be delayed to 2032, or even that it may never happen, making it necessary to adopt an alternative strategy for the management of GC and ARAR in Spain. Among the different alternatives, the permanence of the current Individualized Temporary Stores (ITS) as a long-term storage strategy stands out, and even the possibility of building several distributed temporary storage facilities (DTS) in which to store the SF and HLW from several Spanish NPP. Keywords: nuclear waste, storage, nuclear power plants.

Research Progress on Radiation Shielding Concrete

2012 ◽  
Vol 253-255 ◽  
pp. 303-307 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jing Yang ◽  
Zhen Fu Chen ◽  
Yuan Chu Gan ◽  
Qiu Wang Tao
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Waste ◽  
Material Properties ◽  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Radiation Shielding ◽  
Nuclear Industry ◽  
Research Progress ◽  
Concrete Durability ◽  
Technology Research ◽  
Shielding Material

Radiation shielding concrete is widely used in nuclear power plants, accelerators, hospitals, etc. With the development of nuclear industry technology, research on radiation shielding material properties is of great importance. Research on properties of radiation shielding concrete with different aggregates or admixtures and the effect of high temperature on the performance of shielding concrete are introduced. Along with the nuclear waste increase, shielding concrete durability and nuclear waste disposal are getting paramount.

scholarly journals Temperature conditions in the RBMK spent fuel pool in the event of disturbances in its cooling mode

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-13
Author(s):  
David A. Hakobyan ◽  
Victor I. Slobodchuk
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Nuclear Power Plants ◽  
Spent Nuclear Fuel ◽  
Maximum Temperature ◽  
Spent Fuel ◽  
Cooling Mode ◽  
Temperature Conditions ◽  
Fuel Assemblies ◽  
Spent Fuel Pool

The problems of reprocessing and long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) at nuclear power plants with RBMK reactors have not been fully resolved so far. For this reason, nuclear power plants are forced to search for new options for the disposal of spent fuel, which can provide at least temporary SNF storage. One of the possible solutions to this problem is to switch to compacted SNF storage in reactor spent fuel pools (SFPs). As the number of spent fuel assemblies (SFAs) in SFPs increases, a greater amount of heat is released. In addition, no less important is the fact that a place for emergency FA discharging should be provided in SFPs. The paper presents the results of a numerical simulation of the temperature conditions in SFPs both for compacted SNF storage and for emergency FA discharging. Several types of disturbances in normal SFP cooling mode are considered, including partial loss of cooling water and exposure of SFAs. The simulation was performed using the ANSYS CFX software tool. Estimates were made of the time for heating water to the boiling point, as well as the time for heating the cladding of the fuel elements to a temperature of 650 °С. The most critical conditions are observed in the emergency FA discharging compartment. The results obtained make it possible to estimate the time that the personnel have to restore normal cooling mode of the spent fuel pool until the maximum temperature for water and spent fuel assemblies is reached.

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