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Savannah River marks the closure of another legacy waste tank
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has received concurrence from regulators that Tank 14 at the Savannah River Site has reached preliminary cease waste removal (PCWR) status after radioactive liquid waste was successfully removed from the tank. PCWR is a regulatory milestone in the closure of SRS’s old-style waste tanks, which were built in the 1950s to store waste generated by the chemical separations of plutonium and uranium.
Hitesh Rajput, Tanmoy Som, Soumitra Kar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 192 | Number 2 | November 2015 | Pages 125-132
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-154
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fuel used in nuclear reactors contains fissile material. The fission process releases a huge amount of energy, and hence, the fissioning components must be held in a robust form capable of enduring high operating temperatures and an intense radiation environment. The shape and integrity of the fuel structures must be maintained over a period of several years within the reactor core to prevent the leakage of fission products into the reactor coolant. Further, the fuel rods must be in a nondistorted state for proper alignment in the fuel assembly to ensure proper fuel bundle power distribution. Improper core power distribution can breach the safety and operational limits on fuel and channel powers. The strategy discussed includes the methodology to verify the fuel assembly using image processing techniques. The methodology uses the Radon transform and contains four phases: image reading, preprocessing, Radon transform, and verification. The approach has been validated on 1026 fuel assemblies of a nuclear power plant, for which experimental results are shown.