Characteristics analysis of salt vacuum distillation equipment

A new technique for pyroprocessing was designed by adding an oxide reduction process to the previous one. It is regarded as a promising process to treat and recycle oxide spent fuels owing to its enhanced nuclear proliferation resistance and the simplified process equipment and the low process costing. Spent oxide fuel is reduced into a metal by an electrochemical method while using a high-temperature molten salt as the reaction medium. After being subjected to electrorefining and electrowinning processes, the reduced metal fuel can be used in sodium-cooled fast reactors. The salt vacuum distillation process termed cathode processing follows the oxide reduction stage and has been developed to remove the residual salt, allowing for clear fuel metal to be supplied to the next step, which is electrorefining. KAERI has manufactured this apparatus in several sizes and has been able to achieve a fuel recovery rate of 95%. However it is very difficult to scale up the equipment. Because all transport phenomena, including heat transfer and fluid flow, depend on the size and structure of the apparatus used. The ideal method for overcoming this issue is nondimensionalization, which allows one to determine the characteristic properties of a system. A comparison of the dimensionless variables corresponding to the M-type and P-type apparatuses performed on the basis of phase-transition phenomena as well as the results of the above-mentioned analysis elucidated the differences between the two apparatuses. It also means that the structure of the nozzle throat can be the one of the several causes for the recovery performance. First, the standard model (i.e., the M-type apparatus) was analyzed using dimensionless parameters. The characteristics of this apparatus were the following: 1) the diameter of the outlet of the nozzle throat was twice that of the inlet, 2) the ratio of the length to the diameter (L/D) was 8, and 3) the modified heat-transfer factor was 220-270. It indicates that the distribution of the modified heat-transfer factor can be the criteria of designing apparatuses regardless of their several sizes.