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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.
J. L. Maienschein, F. E. McMurphy, V. L. Duval
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 14 | Number 2 | September 1988 | Pages 701-706
Tritium Properties and Interactions with Material | Proceedings of the Third Topical Meeting on Tritium Technology in Fission, Fusion and Isotopic Applications (Toronto, Ontario, Canada, May 1-6, 1988) | doi.org/10.13182/FST88-A25216
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We report data on tritium permeation at 323 K and 373 K through annealed and single crystal copper for comparison with our earlier data on unannealed copper,1 and show that tritium transport along grain boundaries or other lattice defects controls the overall rate at 323 K in unannealed material. Measurements on unannealed and annealed gold foil also indicate the importance of defect transport, although with gold we could not reduce the defect concentration sufficiently to measure permeation through the metal lattice. We also include permeation data on aluminum, molybdenum, tungsten, beryllium, cadmium, iridium, lead, rhenium, and silver; all of these were probably dominated by tritium transport along lattice defects.