Year
2015
Abstract
For over fifty years, the H Canyon facility at the Savannah River Site (SRS) has performed remotely operated radiochemical separations of irradiated targets and fuels to produce materials for national defense. Although the materials production mission has ended, the facility continues to play an important role in the stabilization and safe disposition of proliferable nuclear materials. As part of the US HEU Disposition Program, SRS down blended legacy site off- specification (off-spec) HEU to produce LEU from 2003 to 2011. Off-spec HEU contains fission products not amenable to meeting the American Society for Testing and Material (ASTM) commercial fuel standards prior to purification. This down blended HEU material produced 301 MT of ~5% enriched LEU which has been and continues to be fabricated into light water reactor fuel being utilized in Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) reactors. The TVA reactors producing economic power are in both Tennessee and Alabama. There is still in excess of ~10 MT of off-spec HEU throughout the DOE complex including future foreign and domestic research reactor returns that could be processed, down blended, and recovered for beneficial use as LEU fuel. An Amended Record of Decision (AROD) was approved in April 2013 allowing additional spent fuels to be processed through SRS’s H Canyon.