Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
5/2/2014
Moving ahead with potentially processing German experimental spent fuel at the Savannah River Site’s H-Canyon, the Department of Energy recently signed a statement of intent with the German government to examine the idea. The highly enriched uranium comes in the form of graphite spheres from the pebble bed AVR gas-cooled research reactor at the Juelich Research Center in Germany. “Under the Statement of Intent, the feasibility of accepting and dispositioning from Germany graphite pebble fuel elements containing U.S.-origin highly enriched uranium (HEU) would be investigated,” Jim Giusti, a spokesman for the DOE Savannah River Operations Office, said in a release this week.
Investigations at Savannah River National Laboratory into potential processing of the fuel began more than a year ago under a $1.5 million grant from Germany. All future work would be funded by the German government under the new agreement with the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Ministry for Innovation, Science and Research of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. Giusti said: “While no decision has been made to accept this fuel, the planned cooperation would support the United States’ efforts to reduce and eventually eliminate highly enriched uranium from civil commerce. By removing U.S.-origin HEU from Germany and returning it to the United States for safe disposition, DOE could render it unusable for use in a nuclear weapon or an improvised nuclear material dispersal device.”
If sent to the United States, the material could well be processed at H-Canyon. “DOE is considering the feasibility of using H-Canyon facilities at SRS to chemically remove the graphite from the fuel kernels,” according to the statement of intent, signed April 1. “Based on positive results of research and development done to date, it appears technically feasible to utilize the H-Canyon facilities at SRS to chemically remove the graphite from the fuel kernels by using a molten salt technique being developed by the Savannah River National Laboratory. The remaining fuel kernels could then be processed through the H-Canyon system for disposition.”
Current German Storage Site Lost Permit
The current interim storage site of the fuel at Juelich center lost its permit last year after failing stress tests, and public protests prevented the transfer of the material to another facility, according to a December release by the German Environmentalists Coalition on Pebble Bed Reactor Waste. While initial tests at SRNL on non-irradiated pellets have proven promising, the particular type fuel has presented a challenge in the past. “There have been attempts to try and separate [the AVR gas-cooled fuel] that have not been successful. So what the lab is doing is trying to make sure that there is a pathway that actually will work, and what will it cost and how will you do that,” Giusti said last year. Because this is a new type of fuel there may be additional modifications to H-Canyon that could add to the cost and questions remain about how to handle the eventual waste, Giusti said then. The German Ministry of Education and Research did not respond to a request for comment.
DOE will “prepare appropriate analysis and consult with the public” as part of the National Environmental Policy Act process, Giusti said this week. That includes preparation of an environmental assessment. But the potential shipment of the fuel to Savannah River has already met opposition from activists in both South Carolina and Germany. “The proposal to import highly radioactive spent fuel from Germany to SRS is simply nuclear dumping dressed up as nuclear non-proliferation,” said Tom Clements, Director of SRS Watch. “Germany’s challenging dilemma with what to do with its nuclear waste must not become a waste management problem for the Savannah River Site. Germany must deal with its own waste and halt consideration of export of it to SRS, which is struggling to deal with high-level nuclear waste already at the site.”
German Group: Nonproliferation ‘Not the Driving Force’
The AVR spent fuel is not a major proliferation risk because it is no longer suitable for weapons use, according to the German Environmentalists Coalition, and transporting the waste from Germany to the United States proposes a bigger threat. “Thus the dangerous far range transport of the large amounts of AVR waste seems to us not to be acceptable. A clear indication that proliferation arguments are not the driving forces for the AVR waste export is the fact that the real proliferation problem, the spent fuel from the second German pebble bed reactor THTR-300 (developed in Juelich), is not discussed in this context,” the group said in the December statement.
The German group instead advocates for storage of the waste in Germany in a secure facility, which involves “construction of a new safe intermediate waste storage facility for AVR spent fuel waste, for the AVR vessel and from 2036 for the THTR fuel, combined with conditioning and handling facilities for this waste, in Juelich.” However, the Juelich center has not pursued this option, the group said, as it “fears a tarnished reputation, if this badly renowned AVR waste stays there in future, and believes that it might become less attractive in the international scientific community, as the chairman of the advisory board outlined. Thus, Juelich does not impel the construction of an improved intermediate storage facility, but tries to export the waste into the US.”
