A quicker way for spent fuel processing at SRS

Employees at the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site in South Carolina have demonstrated their resourcefulness and capabilities by implementing a newly created carrier to transport spent nuclear fuel, reducing the time needed to process the material for permanent disposal in coming years.

A new design: Engineers and operators of an underwater basin at SRS where the fuel is stored recently redesigned the carriers used to transport and store a special type of material. The carriers now have a different aluminum alloy that more easily dissolves, reducing the time needed for fuel disposition in the site's H Canyon chemical separations facility.

Quicker job: Spent fuel from the High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee is sent to SRS to be processed for eventual disposal. HFIR is the highest flux reactor-based source of neutrons for research in the U.S. using highly enriched uranium.

Under an approach called accelerated basin deinventory, SRS will dissolve the fuel at H Canyon and send it through the site's liquid waste program to be vitrified and safely stored on-site until a federal repository is built. According to the DOE, this approach will accelerate the disposition of spent nuclear fuel at SRS by more than 20 years and result in savings of more than $4 billion.

Dissolution pathway: As part of that process, the fuel is placed in casks using the specially designed carriers and sent by rail to H Canyon for processing.

HFIR fuel is shaped differently than other types of spent fuel. It has the form of a cylindrical core rather than a long tube, or bundle, according to Tristan Downey, Spent Fuel Project operations manager with Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the site's managing and operating contractor.