The Department of Energy said Thursday it intends to accelerate removal of all spent nuclear fuel from the L-Basin storage area at Savannah River Site in South Carolina using conventional processing without recovering highly enriched uranium.
In a press release, and accompanying Federal Register notice, DOE spelled out plans to process spent fuel left in L-Basin through H-Canyon without recovery of highly enriched uranium (HEU). The high-level waste will subsequently be immobilized into a glass form at the Defense Waste Processing Facility.
One day, the canisters of high-level waste would be sent away to a future federal repository akin to the moribund Yucca Mountain project in Nevada. This amended Record of Decision (ROD) for spent fuel “de-inventory” at Savannah River Site (SRS) “will free up space in L-Basin for other uses and save taxpayers approximately $4 billion,” DOE said in its press release.
The DOE press release did not list a cost estimate for the conventional processing. The DOE release said the amended ROD would allow processing and disposal of the remaining spent fuel held at the site and conversion of the spent fuel to a more proliferation-resistant form that can be stored for many years while the nation considers a replacement for Yucca.
The DOE’s amended ROD formally abandoned plans to “melt-and-dilute” most aluminum spent nuclear fuel, as the agency envisioned back in 2000. The DOE started moving away from the melt-and-dilute option with an amended ROD in 2013, saying conventional processing could be used for some aluminum spent nuclear fuel.
“The key benefit of the non-recovery scenario is that it requires only a single-unit process step in addition to neutralization, greatly simplifying the processing required in H-Canyon,” DOE said in its document in the Federal Register. “Additionally, no blending down of HEU to low enriched uranium would be required.”
“DOE has been dragging its feet concerning a decision about how to manage spent nuclear fuel at SRS so reaching a final, though flawed decision comes late but is no surprise,” Tom Clements, director of the environmentalist group Savannah River Site Watch, said in response to a Weapons Complex Monitor inquiry. “If the “melt and dilute” preferred alternative, which was undermined by those backing H-Canyon use, had been implemented years ago we would be much further along with emptying spent fuel from the L-Basin; rejecting “melt and dilute” was thus a mistake.”
“The part of the decision that can be fully supported is not to remove uranium from the spent fuel, which is better from a non-proliferation perspective as it avoids HEU separation,” Clements said.
Abandoning uranium recovery would mean creating 435 more high-level-waste, glass-filled, stainless-steel canisters at SRS than planned, DOE said. But that’s only an incremental 7% increase over DOE’s most recent prior estimate that SRS would produce 8,400 glass-filled stainless-steel canisters, the agency said in the notice. The total would stay within the expected 10,000 canisters evaluated in the most recent Environmental Impact Statement.
This week’s amended ROD updates the DOE’s August 2000 ROD for management of about 29.2 metric tons of heavy metal spent fuel and “target materials,” the agency said in the Federal Register notice. The spent fuel removal work would begin this year and run for up to 13 years, according to the notice.
L-Basin, with its thick concrete walls, provides underwater storage for spent fuel from Savannah River’s old nuclear reactors as well as foreign and domestic research reactors, according to DOE. H Canyon is the only operating production-scale, nuclear chemical separations facility in the United States, according to the agency.
