White paper on the proposed design, development, and implementation of a monitored retrievable storage module and the siting criteria for spent nuclear fuel

Abstract

Congress enacted the Nuclear Waste Policy (N W P) Act in 1982 as comprehensive legislation for the DOE to locate, build, and operate repositories to permanently dispose of spent nuclear fuel and other high-level wastes. In 1987, Congress amended the N W P Act and authorized the DOE to site, construct, and operate one Monitored Retrievable Storage (M R S) facility. The M R S facility was planned as a means to enhance the flexibility and reliability of the overall waste management system. This white paper presents a broad prospectus of the scientific and regulatory capabilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory and outlines the methodology to design and implement an MRS test module. This proposed module will incorporate the flexibility to store all types of spent nuclear fuel above or below

A study on artificial rare earth (RE 2 O 3 ) based neutron absorber

“…Among the available systems, Boral™ (Subramanian et al, 2010) and NeutroSorb Plus™ (Fix et al, 2004) are widely used as supplements to criticality control. However, each of these absorbers has one or more disadvantages with respect to fabrication, mechanical properties, material aging, and cost (Villarreal et al, 1996;Licina, 2000). In the case of Boral™, which has an excellent boron loading capability and is a very effective neutron absorber, its disadvantages include very poor mechanical and thermal aging performance.…”