Clearance Issues for Advanced Fusion Power Plants

Abstract

Over the past 10 years, the ARIES team has been devoting a serious effort to reduce the volume of radwaste generated by fusion power plants. Recently, an initiative was launched in the U.S. and Europe to reduce the radwaste volume further by clearing the outer components from regulatory control. Before proceeding further with the development of a new strategy for the U.S. fusion waste management, it is essential to assess the implication of the clearance option on the waste generated by the U.S. advanced power plants. In this paper, we discuss the results of the analysis, the approach adopted by the ARIES team for handling the cleared components, and the U.S. market for cleared metals. Our results state that, because of the compactness of the design, none of the ARIES-AT fusion power core components has a clearance index below one at the end of the 100 year interim storage period and all components should be either recycled or disposed near surface as low-level waste. At present, the U.S. industry has zero tolerance for metals with very low radiation level, meaning the commercial market for cleared metals does not exist.