Status of development of actinide blanket processing flowsheets for accelerator transmutation of nuclear waste

An accelerator-driven subcritical nuclear system is briefly described that transmutes actinides and selected long-lived fission products. An application of this accelerator transmutation of nuclear waste (ATW) concept to spent fuel from a commercial nuclear power plant is presented as an example. The emphasis here is on a possible aqueous processing flowsheet to separate the actinides and selected long-lived fission products from the remaining fission products within the transmutation system. In the proposed system the actinides circulate through the thermal neutron flux as a slurry of oxide particles in heavy water in two loops with different average residence times: one loop for neptunium and plutonium and one for americium and curium. Material from the Np/Pu loop is processed with a short cooling time (5-10 days) because of the need to keep the total actinide inventory, low for this particular ATW application. The high radiation and thermal load from the irradiated material places severe constraints on the separation processes that can be used. The oxide particles are dissolved in nitric acid and a quarternary, ammonium anion exchanger is used to extract neptunium, plutonium, technetium, and palladium. After further cooling (about 90 days), the Am, Cm and higher actinides are extracted using a TALSPEAK-type process. The proposed operations were chosen because they have been successfully tested for processing high-level radioactive fuels or wastes in gram to kilogram quantities