The Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP), located at the Hanford Site in southeastern Washington, and operated by the Westinghouse Hanford Company (WHC) for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), contains plutonium-bearing material from 40+ years of processing plutonium for weapons production, research needs, and reactor fuel. In 1989 the plant was shut down, and DOE now wants to prepare these residues for storage. However, further processing will be required to stabilize many of these materials for interim storage (< 50 years).This engineering study was performed by the Pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNL) for WHC to evaluate the currently available and known technologies at Hanford and elsewhere for processing plutonium-bearing materials into a stable form. The inventory of plutonium-bearing materials stored in various vaults at the PFP was received from WHC in an unclassified form for use in this study. Table S. 1 summarizes that inventory. PNL staff conducted the study by compiling information on the technologies that would be considered, performing an initial screening, developing process descriptions, and subcontracting with an independent review team to evaluate and rank the processes. This independent review team consisted of representatives from the national laboratories and industry who are considered to be experts in the subject matter.Once PNL completed its analysis, the independent review team began a review of the technologies that passed the initial screening. Specifically, the goals of the independent review were to ensure that the appropriate set of technologies was considered, to identify any technologies that may have been overlooked by PNL, and to identify any significant issues relating to the technologies considered.The process for conducting the independent technical review involved the following activities: a presentation on specific technical information on each candidate technology by PNL staff to the independent review team a screening of the technologies that were initially identified to establish the applicable technologies a rating of the feasible alternatives against a predetermined set of criteria. These criteria consisted of technical feasibility, effluent and by-product disposition, worker safety, cost, and time required for implementing the technology and processing the plutonium. Note that the cost data are very, very preliminary and that a rigorous procedure for estimating costs was not applied in a consistent manner.Based upon its findings, the independent review team identified the preferred technologies for each waste stream (Le., liquid or solid effluents) as summarized in Table S.2. These technologies were, in general, preferred based on meeting the criteria of availability, flexibility, and technical maturity. 2. The preferred processes should be developed and finalized on an expedited basis. In addition, the development of the molten salt oxidation process followed by plutonium oxide recovery should be expedited. This process was the only technology identified that had multi-pu...

The basic purpose of this handbook is to document a set of systematic procedures for providing information that can be used in performing valueimpact assessments of Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) regulatory actions. The handbook describes a structured but flexible process for performing the assessment. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the value-impact assessment process. Chapter 2 describes the attributes most frequently affected by proposed NRC actions, provides guidance concerning the appropriate level of effort to be devoted to the assessment, suggests a standard format for documenting the assessment, and discusses the treatment of uncertainty. Chapter 3 contains detailed methods for evaluating each of the attributes affected by a regulatory action. The handbook has five appendixes containing background information, technical data, and example applications of the value-impact assessment procedures. This edition of the handbook focuses primarily on assessing nuclear power reactor safety issues.

This article focuses on what have been, and may continue to be, the more controversial aspects of fires at commercial nuclear power plants regulated by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Examining what has transpired in fire protection regulation since the 1975 fire at Browns Ferry Unit 1, which first focused attention on the potential hazard of fire at commercial nuclear power plants, we offer a personal perspective as to whether or not the ''the flames of controversy'' have been ''doused.'' We show that significant progress has been made while speculating whether these ''flames'' may ever truly be extinguished, or only kept under control. No core damage accident has ever occurred at a commercial nuclear power plant due to fire.

Infrequently, it seems that a significant accident precursor or, worse, an actual accident, involving a commercial nuclear power reactor occurs to remind us of the need to reexamine the safety of this important electrical power technology from a risk perspective. Twenty-five years since the major core damage accident at Chernobyl in the Ukraine, the Fukushima reactor complex in Japan experienced multiple core damages as a result of an earthquake-induced tsunami beyond either the earthquake or tsunami design basis for the site. Although the tsunami itself killed tens of thousands of people and left the area devastated and virtually uninhabitable, much concern still arose from the potential radioactive releases from the damaged reactors, even though there was little population left in the area to be affected. As a lifelong probabilistic safety analyst in nuclear engineering, even I must admit to a recurrence of the doubt regarding nuclear power safety after Fukushima that I had experienced after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. This article is my attempt to "recover" my personal perspective on acceptable risk by examining both the domestic and worldwide history of commercial nuclear power plant accidents and attempting to quantify the risk in terms of the frequency of core damage that one might glean from a review of operational history.

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