Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
5/30/2014
The Department of Energy said this week that it plans to prepare an environmental assessment for accepting German experimental spent fuel for processing at the Savannah River Site’s H-Canyon facility. The 900 kilograms of U.S.-origin highly enriched uranium comes in the form of graphite spheres from the pebble bed AVR gas-cooled research reactor at the Juelich Research Center. “DOE would install a capability in H-Canyon at SRS, which would chemically remove the graphite from the fuel kernels via a graphite digestion technology being developed by the Savannah River National Laboratory. The EA will analyze potential environmental impacts of transporting the fuel to SRS, storage and processing at SRS, and alternatives for disposition of the HEU that would be separated from the fuel kernels,” the DOE Savannah River Operations Office said in a release.
A public scoping meeting for the environmental assessment will be held on June 24 in North Augusta, S.C. “While no decision has been made to accept this fuel, the planned cooperation would support the United States’ efforts to reduce and eventually eliminate HEU 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 in a nuclear weapon or an improvised nuclear material dispersal device,” the DOE release says.
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. “SRNL has developed a method to digest the graphite while leaving the fuel kernels intact,” the DOE release says. “The SRNL method does not generate graphite fines, typically seen with mechanical graphite removal methods. The technology has proven to be repeatable with 95 percent volume reduction. Research teams at SRNL and the Juelich Laboratory (FZJ) in Germany have independently confirmed results of SRNL’s graphite dissolution chemistry on un-irradiated fuel and some sample size irradiated fuel. Continuation of this work is furthered by the recently signed $8.5 million Work for Others Agreement.” 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.
German Group Opposes Shipping Waste
Removal of the fuel from Germany has been opposed, though, by some German advocacy groups. The current interim storage site of the fuel at the 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. The AVR spent fuel is not a major proliferation risk because it is no longer suitable for weapons use, according to the group, 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.
