International Conference on the Management of Spent Fuel from Nuclear Power Reactors 2019: Learning from the Past, Enabling the Future

A New design of a PWR fuel assembly for direct recycling of spent fuel

26 Jun 2019, 10:30

30m

Poster Track 4: Recycling as a spent fuel management option Track 4 Poster Session

Speaker

Prof. Nader Mohamed

Description

A new design for the PWR fuel assembly has been proposed, in a previous work, for direct use of the PWR spent fuel without chemical or dry processing has been proposed. The proposed designed assembly consists of four zircaloy-4 tubes. Each tube contains 7 or 8 CANDU fuel bundles stacked end to end. The zircaloy-4 tube has the same inner diameter of CANDU pressure tube. The PWR spent fuel bundles will be transferred directly to CANDU reactors without processing. The CANDU reactor is preferably be built in the same site to avoid the problem of transportations. In the current work, a different case has been studied for improving the uranium utilization and for reducing the high level waste. Generally, the calculations resulted in that the burnup would be increased by about 35%. The proposed strategy would reduce the high level waste. Moreover, direct recycling of the spent fuel would degrade the plutonium vector which enhances the proliferation resistance.

Peer reviewing

Paper

Accepted on 27 May 2019 by Amparo Gonzalez-Espartero

Paper files:

• IAEA-CN272-16-R.docx