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Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Latest News
Take steps on SNF and HLW disposal
Matt Bowen
With a new administration and Congress, it is time once again to ponder what will happen—if anything—on U.S. spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste management policy over the next few years. One element of the forthcoming discussion seems clear: The executive and legislative branches are eager to talk about recycling commercial SNF. Whatever the merits of doing so, it does not obviate the need for one or more facilities for disposal of remaining long-lived radionuclides. For that reason, making progress on U.S. disposal capabilities remains urgent, lest the associated radionuclide inventories simply be left for future generations to deal with.
In March, Rick Perry, who was secretary of energy during President Trump’s first administration, observed that during his tenure at the Department of Energy it became clear to him that any plan to move SNF “required some practical consent of the receiving state and local community.”1
M. V. Ramaniah, H. C. Jain, S. K. Aggarwal, S. A. Chitambar, V. D. Kavimandan, A. I. Almaula, P. M. Shah, A. R. Parab, V. L. Sant
Nuclear Technology | Volume 49 | Number 1 | June 1980 | Pages 121-128
Technical Paper | Nuclear Power Reactor Safety / Chemical Processing | doi.org/10.13182/NT80-A32513
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Isotope Dilution Alpha Spectrometry (IDAS) and Reverse Isotope Dilution Alpha Spectrometry (RIDAS) have been developed for determining the concentration of plutonium in the irradiated fuel dissolver solution. The method exploits 238Pu in IDAS and 239Pu in R-IDAS as a spike and provides an alternative method in the event of nonavailability of 242Pu, which is required in Isotope Dilution Mass Spectrometry (IDMS). Depending upon the burnup of the fuel, 238Pu or 239Pu is used as a spike to change the 238Pu/(239Pu + 240Pu) alpha activity ratio in the sample by a factor of 10. This change is determined by alpha spectrometry on electro-deposited sources using a solid-state silicon surface barrier detector coupled to a multichannel analyzer. The validity of a simple method based on the geometric progression decrease for the far tail of the spectrum to correct for the tail contribution of 238Pu (5.50-MeV) peak to the low energy 239Pu + 240Pu (5.17-MeV) peak is established. Results for the plutonium concentration on different irradiated fuel dissolver solutions with burnup ranging from 1000 to 100 000 MWd/tU are presented and compared with those obtained by IDMS. The values obtained by IDAS or R-IDAS and IDMS agree to within 0.5%.
