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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.
Gary S. Was, Lawrence M. Lidsky
Nuclear Technology | Volume 43 | Number 3 | May 1979 | Pages 289-300
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT79-A19218
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A purging process was developed that will permit operation of fusion reactor blankets employing solid LiAlO2 as the breeder material at fuel temperatures of <600°C. The low fuel temperature would greatly reduce the problems of fuel sintering, densification, and volume expansion that occur at fuel temperatures in excess of 900°C without degrading the plant thermal efficiency. The process consists of heating the blanket to a specified temperature for a given time at regular intervals to release tritium held up in the breeding material As an example, a detailed purging cycle was developed for the breeder rod shim rod blanket that uses LiAlO2 in the form of micron-size particles compacted into millimetre-size pellets and is designed for low-temperature operation. Tritium inventory, doubling time, purging time, purging temperature, purging frequency, and particle size are the parameters used to evaluate the process. Calculations indicate that breeder particle sizes ranging from 20 to 50 μm and purging temperatures ranging from 600 to 700°C can result in purge times of <1 h with three or more weeks between purges, and a doubling time of 7 yr for a blanket inventory limit of 5 kg and a breeding ratio of <1.02.