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Spent fuel recycling and conditioning topic of U.S.-Japan meeting
Officials with the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management discussed spent nuclear fuel recycling and conditioning with counterparts from Japan during the 13th U.S.-Japan Technical Meeting of the Civil Nuclear Energy Research and Development Working Group, held recently in Santa Fe, N.M.
M. Shim, H. Chung, S. Cho, H. Yoshida
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 3 | April 2008 | Pages 830-840
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-26
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Quantitative assessment of a disproportionation in the ZrCo-hydrogen system under ITER-relevant operating conditions was performed by means of experimental tests and a theoretical calculation. In the static temperature experiments with equilibrium hydrogen pressures, a 10% disproportionation of ZrCoHx (x = 2.0 and 2.5) was observed in 5.5 h at 415°C (~78 kPa), 9 h at 400°C (~72 kPa), 172 h at 380°C (~51 kPa), and 1626 h at 350°C (~28 kPa). An experimental formula [log = 17 268/T (K) - 25.814, where is the reaction time (day) of 10% disproportionation] was derived from these experiments. Experiments with a temperature cycling of up to 125 cycles (from room temperature to 350 to 360°C) proved that no enhancement of a disproportionation occurs in the ZrCoHx (1.7 < x 2.0). Typical operation conditions of the ZrCo hydride bed for the D-T gas storage delivery system were proposed based on the ITER FDR 2000 plasma operation scenarios. The disproportionation rate estimated conservatively by the theoretical model indicates that a disproportionation in the ITER basic performance phase can be reduced by <4% even when there is a direct supply from the fuel storage and delivery system beds for all the D-T pulses and by <0.1% when the supply is from the hydrogen isotope separation system.