Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology

A conceptual design study for a pyroprocesing facility, has been carried out in this study, which is available for the recovery of uranium and transuranic elemental group(TRU), that is, reusable as a nuclear fuel especially in a next generation-type reactor. The scale of this facility has been chosen as 20 kg HM/batch, comparatively small engineering size in order to collect scale-up data for the design of a commercial facility as well as to get operational experience. The spent fuel to be handled in this process is as follows : 3.5 % enriched uranium fuel, 35,000MWd/tU and 5-year cooled. The major items considered in the conceptual study are a building lay-out including various hot cells, safety management of the process operation in conjunction with material balance control, radiation safety, inert atmosphere control in shield hot cells, and criticality control of uranium and TRU products.

Keywords

Pyroprocessing of spent fuels,Nuclear fuel cycle based on dry process,Conceptual design study of pyroprocessing facility