Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
12/19/2014
A new long-term campaign to downblend 1,200 bundles of spent fuel at Savannah River’s H-Canyon is well underway, site officials said this week. In September, the site’s managing contractor, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, began initial processing in an eight-to-10-year campaign to downblend highly enriched uranium from research reactor fuel stored at the site’s L-Basin, including about 1,000 bundles of Material Test Reactor fuel and up to 200 cores of High Flux Isotope Reactor fuel. The mission has multiple benefits, according to officials, chief among them freeing up space in the crowded and aging L-Basin pool, in addition to meeting nonproliferation goals and providing a source of low enriched uranium to be used for commercial reactor fuel.
The material will ultimately go into Tennessee Valley Authority reactors as a continuation of a successful HEU downblend program that ran at H-Canyon from 2003 to 2011. “We are still in contact with TVA and they still want it as much and as fast as we can get it to them, they’ll take it, which is great. This has another life,” SRNS HEU Disposition Manager Virginia Magoulas told WC Monitor this week. The new mission was formalized in an Amended Record of Decision signed in March 2013.
This latest campaign began in September, right as SRNS wrapped up an effort to process 36 bundles of sodium reactor experimental fuel , which was deemed highly vulnerable in L-Basin and was prepared for disposal instead of downblended. The new campaign is expected to take about 8 to 10 years to downblend at a rate of four to 10 batches per year, dependent on funding and the composition of the material, with each batch containing 20 bundles. “It’s a slow moving train,” Magoulas said.
While the material is currently being processed now, the downblending is not expected to occur until the end of Fiscal Year 2016. “That’s when we’ll start getting through the process and will have enough material to where we can downblend it in order to make continued processing seamless versus a start and stop effort,” Magoulas said. “Once we get the uranium separated we take it from the Canyon into H outside facilities, which is where we do the downblending. We blend it with natural uranium and create the downblended LEU,” she explained.
International Missions not Expected to Impact Campaign
Several other missions are currently being considered for H-Canyon, including processing of highly enriched uranium from Canada, Germany, Japan and Belgium. However, those are not expected to impact the current campaign given the facility’s large capacity, according to Magoulas. “I don’t foresee that being any big issue or creating any delays on one side or the other,” she said. “I think there is room to run concurrently without issue.”
The new campaign is particularly important as Savannah River’s L-Basin fills with used fuel. “For years, H Canyon’s primary mission was to separate uranium from SNF,” Bill Clifton, SRNS Senior Technical Advisor, said in a statement. “Now, L Basin is beginning to near capacity, so it became necessary for us to start processing SNF again.”
