Authors
William Carmack, Randy D Lee, Pavel Medvedev, Mitch Meyer, Michael Todosow, Holly B Hamilton, Juan Nino, Simon Philpot, James Tulenko
Publication date
2005/6/1
Issue
INL/EXT-05-00436
Publisher
Idaho National Lab.(INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
Description
The U.S. Advanced Fuel Cycle Program and the Atomic Energy Canada Ltd (AECL) seek to develop and demonstrate the technologies needed to minimize the overall Pu and minor actinides present in the light water reactor (LWR) nuclear fuel cycles. It is proposed to reuse the Pu from LWR spent fuel both for the energy it contains and to decrease the hazard and proliferation impact resulting from storage of the Pu and minor actinides. The use of fuel compositions with a combination of U and Pu oxide (MOX) has been proposed as a way to recycle Pu and/or minor actinides in LWRs. It has also been proposed to replace the fertile U{sup 238} matrix of MOX with a fertile-free matrix (IMF) to reduce the production of Pu{sup 239} in the fuel system. It is important to demonstrate the performance of these fuels with the appropriate mixture of isotopes and determine what impact there might be from trace elements or contaminants. Previous work has already been done to look at weapons-grade (WG) Pu in the MOX configuration [1][2] and the reactor-grade (RG) Pu in a MOX configuration including small (4000 ppm additions of Neptunium). This program will add to the existing database by developing a wide variety of MOX fuel compositions along with new fuel compositions called inert-matrix fuel (IMF). The goal of this program is to determine the general fabrication and irradiation behavior of the proposed IMF fuel compositions. Successful performance of these compositions will lead to further selection and development of IMF for use in LWRs. This experiment will also test various inert matrix material compositions with and without quantities of the minor …
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