Comparison of accelerator-based with reactor-based nuclear waste transmutation schemes |
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Authors: | W. C. Sailor C. A. Beard F. Venneri J. W. Davidson |
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Affiliation: | Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, U.S.A. |
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Abstract: | An overview of the most significant studies in the last 35 years of partitioning and transmutation of commercial light water reactor spent fuel is given. Recent Accelerator-based Transmutation of Waste (ATW) systems are compared with liquid-fuel thermal reactor systems that accomplish the same objectives. If no long-lived fission products (e.g., 99Tc and 129I) are to be burned, under ideal circumstances the neutron balance in an ATW system becomes identical to that for a thermal reactor system. However, such a reactor would need extraordinarily rapid removal of internally-generated fission products to remain critical at equilibrium without enriched feed. The accelerator beam thus has two main purposes (1) the burning of long-lived fission products that could not be burned in a comparable reactor's margin (2) a relaxing of on-line chemical processing requirements without which a reactor-based system cannot maintain criticality. Fast systems would require a parallel, thermal ATW system for long-lived fission product transmutation. The actinide-burning part of a thermal ATW system is compared with the Advanced Liquid Metal Reactor (ALMR) using the well-known Pigford-Choi model. It is shown that the ATW produces superior inventory reduction factors for any near-term time scale. |
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