Moving ahead with potentially processing German experimental spent fuel at the Savannah River Site, the Department of Energy has signed a statement of intent with the German government to look at processing and disposing of the material at the site. The highly enriched uranium comes in graphite spheres from the for pebble bed AVR gas-cooled research reactor at the Juelich Research Center in Germany. “Under the Statement of Intent, the feasibility of accepting and dispositioning from Germany graphite pebble fuel elements containing U.S.-origin highly enriched uranium (HEU) would be investigated,” DOE-SR spokesman Jim Giusti said in a statement this week. The current interim storage site of the fuel at Juelich center lost its permit last year after failing stress tests, and public protests prevented the transfer of the material to another facility, according to information released in December by the German Environmentalists Coalition on Pebble Bed Reactor Waste.
Investigations at Savannah River National Laboratory into potential processing of the fuel began more than a year ago under a $3 million grant from Germany. All future work would be funded by the German government under the new agreement with the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Ministry for Innovation, Science and Research of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. “While no decision has been made to accept this fuel, the planned cooperation would support the United States’ efforts to reduce and eventually eliminate highly enriched uranium from civil commerce,” Giusti said. “By removing U.S.-origin HEU from Germany and returning it to the United States for safe disposition, DOE could render it unusable for use in a nuclear weapon or an improvised nuclear material dispersal device.”
