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GAO: Clarification of HLW definition could save DOE billions
A clearer definition of what constitutes high-level radioactive waste could save the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management “tens of billions of dollars” in waste management costs and accelerate its cleanup schedule by decades, according to a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
DOE-EM’s efforts to manage waste resulting from legacy spent nuclear fuel reprocessing have been hindered for decades by the ambiguity of the statutory definition of HLW as laid out in the Atomic Energy Act and Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the report states. While admitting that the DOE has taken steps to overcome this ambiguity, the GAO says that the department has not fully evaluated all available opportunities to treat and dispose of waste more economically as either transuranic or low-level radioactive waste.
L. Cadwallader, T. Pinna
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 351-356
Safety, Environment, and Tritium Handling | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 1), Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A18102
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Double walled or double containment piping is considered for use in the ITER international project and other next-generation fusion device designs to provide an extra barrier for tritium gas and other radioactive materials. The extra barrier improves confinement of these materials and enhances safety of the facility. This paper describes some of the design challenges in designing double containment piping systems. There is also a brief review of a few operating experiences of double walled piping used with hazardous chemicals in different industries. The authors recommend approaches for the reliability analyst to use to quantify leakage from a double containment piping system in conceptual and more advanced designs. The paper also cites quantitative data that can be used to support such reliability analyses.