Uranium separation resumes at Savannah River Site

A facility for separating uranium from used research reactor fuel at the US Department of Energy's Savannah River Site in South Carolina has restarted for the first time in five years. The extracted uranium will be used in new fuel for nuclear power plants.

A facility for separating uranium from used research reactor fuel at the US Department of Energy's (DOE's) Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina has restarted for the first time in five years. The extracted uranium will be used in new fuel for nuclear power plants.

In the First Cycle facility in the H Canyon chemical separations plant at SRS, highly-enriched uranium (HEU) from used US and foreign research reactor fuel is separated from the aluminium cladding, fission products and other impurities.

Senior control room operators prepare for the restart of the First Cycle (Image: DOE SRS)

It is the fourth out of five facilities to restart since 2013, allowing SRS to process 1000 bundles of used fuel and 200 High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) cores. The fifth and final facility - which downdblends the separated HEU to low-enriched uranium (LEU) by mixing it with natural uranium - has yet to be restarted.

DOE assistant manager for nuclear material stabilization, Patrick McGuire, said, "LEU blend down is estimated to restart within two years. After blend down, the LEU will be shipped to a Tennessee Valley Authority vendor for manufacture of reactor fuel to be used for the production of commercial nuclear power. The last shipment made to the vendor was in November 2011. As more material is shipped, more [used nuclear fuel] will be able to be removed from wet storage in the SRS L Area Basin, processed through the H Canyon and shipped to TVA."

He added, "Disposition of the approximately 1000 bundles and up to 200 HFIR cores is expected to be completed in 2024, which would potentially allow DOE to authorize more missions for H Canyon. Producing LEU again in H Canyon helps keep our nation safe, while providing clean energy; it would be hard to find a better mission than that."

H Canyon was built in the early 1950s, began operations in 1955 and is today the only operating production-scale, radiologically shielded chemical separations facility in the USA. The interior of the building resembles a canyon, with 2-metre thick dense concrete walls separating workers from the processing areas where work is performed remotely using overhead bridge cranes.

Historically, H-Canyon recovered uranium-235 and neptunium-237 from aluminium-clad enriched uranium fuel. It was also able to recover neptunium-237 and plutonium-238 from special irradiated targets, and played a vital role up to 2008 in the production of the plutonium-238 used to power numerous deep space exploration programs. In more recent years, the facility has continued to treat nuclear materials as part of DOE's environmental management program.

Management of SRS is carried out on behalf of the DOE by Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, a partnership between Fluor, Newport News Nuclear and Honeywell.

Researched and written
by World Nuclear News