Indonesian Highly Enriched Uranium-Bearing Waste Elimination - 17393

The Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the Y-12 National Security Complex (Y-12) have been working with PT Industri Nuklir Indonesia (PT Inuki), an Indonesian medical isotope producer, since 2014 to disposition all highly enriched uranium (HEU) stored at the government-owned Research Center for Science and Technology (PUSPIPTEK) near Serpong, Indonesia. To eliminate the 1.5 kilograms of liquid HEU at the facility, Y-12 proposed a method to down-blend the leftover process solutions with a depleted uranium solution made on-site to render low-enriched uranium (LEU). This method is essentially irreversible since the uranium enrichment is degraded using a molecular level of intimate mixing in aqueous solution. This cooperation was tied to a presidential commitment made at the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit to down-blend all remaining HEU in Indonesia by September 2016. While all unirradiated HEU was down-blended to LEU in March 2016, the campaign to down-blend the 1.4 kilograms of irradiated HEU began in late July 2016 and was completed in August, making Indonesia and all of Southeast Asia free of HEU. As part of this cooperation, Y-12 and NNSA also proposed a subsequent disposition option for the LEU solution whereby the irradiated and unirradiated solutions will be chemically manipulated to prepare a dry LEU oxide suitable for interim storage and yield a uranium-free liquid stream that can be discarded as radioactive waste. In the fall of 2016, Y-12 and NNSA plan to begin developing the LEU solution disposition methodology with the Indonesian facility using small-scale batch-wise methods within existing hot cells, involving straightforward precipitation, ion exchange, decantation, and calcination methods. (authors)