Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
1/23/2015
While a Savannah River National Laboratory study has concluded that processing a difficult batch of German highly enriched uranium at the Savannah River Site is feasible, no decision will be made on accepting the fuel until a final environmental assessment is issued this summer, a Department of Energy spokesman said this week. 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 Germany’s Juelich Research Center, and have proved difficult to process in the past. DOE has proposed processing the material at Savannah River’s H-Canyon facility. An SRNL preliminary feasibility study completed last fall concluded that while processing there is feasible, additional development work is necessary, according to Jim Giusti, a spokesman for the DOE Savannah River Operations Office. “In early December 2014, Germany approved the continuation of the technology development and will provide $3 million for the additional work to be performed by SRNL,” Giusti said in a statement.
Initial investigations at SRNL began in 2013 under a $1.5 million grant from Germany and was furthered by an $8.5 million work for others agreement in 2014. DOE has said the work would be fully funded by the German government under an 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.
Environmental Assessment Slated for Summer
In May, DOE began to prepare an environmental assessment for the potential acceptance of the German material and accepted public comment on the document after a scoping meeting last summer. “DOE continues preparation, with support from SRNL, of the Environmental Assessment (EA), which will address public comments received since the public meeting in July 2014,” Giusti said. “A draft EA for public review is expected to be issued in early spring 2015. A second public meeting will be held in late spring to solicit additional comments from the public. A final EA is expected to be issued in summer 2015. No decision on accepting the German fuel for processing can be made until after the final EA is issued.” The environmental assessment would “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,” DOE said in May 2014.
The method being investigated at SRNL involves removing the graphite from the fuel kernels via a graphite digestion technology, DOE has said. “SRNL has developed a method to digest the graphite while leaving the fuel kernels intact,” DOE said in a May 2014 release. “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.”
