The Department of Energy has approved its plan to speed up spent fuel removal from the L-Basin storage area at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
In a Monday press release, DOE announced approval of what it calls accelerated basin de-inventory ABD, which would use H Canyon to dissolve spent nuclear fuel without processing it further into low-enriched uranium (LEU). DOE will then immobilize the high-level radioactive waste with stable glass at the site’s Defense Waste Processing Facility.
The resulting glass canisters would be stored onsite until DOE develops a geologic repository for high-level waste — something similar to the morribund Yucca Mountain site in Nevada. The agency published an environmental review in support of the plan in March.
The Cold War-era H Canyon chemical separations facility — built to separate plutonium for use in nuclear weapons — has been used since the 1990s to dissolve spent nuclear fuel from foreign and domestic research reactors. The fuel is stored underwater in L Basin. The only functioning chemical separations facility of its kind left in the country, Congress has required DOE to keep H-Canyon operating.
However, H Canyon is nearly 70 years old and costly to run, Eloy Saldivar, ABD program manager for DOE prime Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, said in the press release. “Add that to the fact that L Basin is nearing its storage capacity, and there are other cheaper sources of fuel for commercial power reactors, so our LEU is no longer needed.”
In the past, The Tennessee Valley Authority has used some of the down-blended fuel in its reactors, according to the DOE.
The DOE’s plans to manage the 29.2 metric tons of spent fuel without uranium recovery was announced in an April notice in the Federal Register. Starting the new process this year could result in completion of the de-inventory within 13 years, which would be 2035, DOE indicated in the notice.
The number of glass canisters stored at Savannah River Site would increase by 435 under the new approach, DOE said in the notice, but this would represent only about a 7% increase over the previously-forecast total of 8,400 containers.
The original lifecycle for L Basin and H Canyon was 2060, and original funding profile for L Basin and H Canyon was approximately $8.5 billion, a DOE spokesperson said via email Wednesday. The agency hopes this approach might reduce the price tag by up to $4 billion, according to the press release.
That would still be about 1,000 canisters fewer than the prior estimate of 10,000 that DOE included in the final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement on Savannah River spent fuel management during the 1990s, according to the agency.
