Passive Sampling Tool for Actinides in Spent Nuclear Fuel Pools

Abstract

Spent nuclear fuel must be carefully managed to prevent pollution of the environment with radionuclides. Within the framework of correct radioactive waste management, spent fuel rods are stored in cooling pools to allow short-lived fission products to decay. If fuel rods leak, they liberate radionuclides into the cooling water; therefore, it is essential to determine radionuclide concentrations in the pool water for monitoring purposes and to plan the decommissioning process. In this work, we present, to our knowledge, the first passive sampling technique for measures of actinides in spent nuclear fuel pools, based on recently developed diffusive gradients in thin-film (DGT) configurations. These samplers eliminate the need to retrieve and handle large samples of fuel pool water for radiochemical processing by immobilizing their targeted radionuclides in situ on the solid phase within the sampler. This is additionally the first application of the DGT technique for Cm measure. Herein, we make the calibrated effective diffusion coefficients of U, Pu, Am, and Cm in borated spent fuel pool water available. We tested these samplers in the fuel pool of a nuclear facility and measured samples using accelerator mass spectrometry to provide high-precision isotopic reports, allowing for the first independent implementation of a recently developed technique for dating nuclear fuel based on its Cm isotope signature.

Time-Integrated Bioavailability Proxy for Actinides in a Contaminated Estuary

“…In this work, we deployed recently developed DGT configurations for measures of U, Pu, and Am , (collectively “the target actinides”) in middle and lower estuary environments within the Esk Estuary (UK), which is a subcomponent of the macrotidal Ravenglass Estuary system. The Esk Estuary has been impacted by historic radionuclide discharges from the nearby Sellafield facility and has a highly dynamic hydraulic regime, which is known to significantly affect metal concentrations in the water throughout the tidal cycle .…”