PYROPROCESSING PROGRESS AT IDAHO NATIONAL LABORATORY

Abstract

At the end of May 2007, 830 and 2600 kilograms of EBR-II driver and blanket metal fuel have been treated by a pyroprocess since spent fuel operations began in June 1996. A new metal waste furnace has completed out-of-cell testing and is being installed in the Hot Fuel Examination Facility. Also, ceramic waste process development and qualification is progressing so integrated nuclear fuel separations and high level waste processes will exist at Idaho National Laboratory. These operations have provided important scale-up and performance data on engineering scale operations. Idaho National Laboratory is also increasing their laboratory scale capabilities so new process improvements and new concepts can be tested before implementation at engineering scale. This paper provides an overview of recent achievements and provides the interested reader references for more details.