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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.
Bradley Heath, Colby Jensen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 9 | September 2020 | Pages 1436-1448
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1725370
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Transient Reactor Test (TREAT) Facility is a graphite reactor capable of delivering tailored power histories to unique experiment designs. Frequently, these experiments are designed to simulate a specific reactor transient to perform detailed studies of reactor fuel behavior. The reactor core is uniquely designed to allow a limited energy release and resulting peak fuel cladding temperature such that thermal feedback mechanisms shut the reactor power transient down in a passive manner, thus maximizing the lifetime of the reactor fuel cladding. The reactor is air cooled; however, the cooling system does not serve a safety function. The air cooling is typically used for four main functions: (1) accelerate cooling of the reactor core to ambient temperature post transient operations, (2) remove activated gases from the reactor cavity, (3) perform heat balance for power calibration, and (4) maintain criticality on extended steady-state runs or shaped transients. With the restart of the reactor, these systems are now fully operational and have been exercised during the past year for the first time in more than 20 years. This paper summarizes the thermal properties of the core and the thermal-hydraulic design of the TREAT Facility and presents selected results of temperature profiles resulting from operation. Conservatively estimated maximum transient energy and steady-state power is provided.