Part 1 of 2 Parts
Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) is the only Department of Energy (DoE) Office of Environmental Management that has a history deeply rooted in environmental stewardship efforts such as nuclear material processing and disposition technologies. SRNL’s expertise is now being leveraged to deal with nuclear fuel supply-chain obstacles by providing a source of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel for advanced reactors.
SRNL carried out a study in 2019 that evaluated the potential for producing low-enriched uranium from the reprocessing of high-enriched foreign and domestic research reactor fuel at the H Canyon facility at the Savanna River Site (SRS). H Canyon previously produced LEU containing about five percent by weight (wt%) uranium-235 from the reprocessing of surplus high-enriched uranium to make it usable to fabricate fuel for use in a commercial reactor. Although both timeline and volume capabilities were favorable, no contract for the product was established at that time. In November of the following year, the DoE requested a similar report estimating potential capacity for HALEU production if the same facility and feedstock were used to produce about twenty precent wt% U-235 solution. However, the shutdown of separations technology through H Canyon in 2022 left the previously recovered HEU solution as the only material remaining in the facility that had the potential to be used to produce HALEU.
As SRNL was investigating materials, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Nuclear Materials Integration Division contracted the lab to lead a project seeking a solution for disposition challenges arising from the diverse nuclear material inventories across the DoE complex. This project completed a 2020 report that assessed specific DoE material inventories at each site to create a DoE-wide view of the major groups of materials categorized as having a “to be determined” disposition pathway. This study also reviewed projected future volumes of materials. Facility planning estimates were used for forecasting expected volumes of materials coming from research reactors and other sources with known disposition issues. Considering the impact of these future materials was important for both safety and security purposes. The SRNL team created a robust quantitative ranking system in 2023 that evaluated the options for disposition of each TBD material group. Although the original purpose of this project was materials disposition, SRNL found value in the process of unpackaging and chemically processing some of the material.
Cathy Ramsey is a SRNL engineer who was an integral part of both the TBD materials assessment and the initial HALEU feedstock estimates and proposals. She said, “SRNL has a reputation as EM’s lab and of being the expert in disposition, but disposition doesn’t always mean disposal. Irradiated nuclear materials offer opportunities to reprocess and recycle into new materials, and now is the time to really evaluate those opportunities. We need to have a longer view of the nuclear material life cycle than we’ve ever had before, which SRNL drives home in everything that we do.”
Savannah River National Laboratory
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