A disruptive approach to eliminating weapon-grade plutonium – Pu burning in a molten salt fast reactor

Abstract

The successful implementation of disarmament treaties of the last centuries has led to significant amounts of weapon-grade Plutonium which are currently stored in high security storage facilities. Disposing this Plutonium should be seen as ‘good housekeeping’ avoiding unnecessary costs and the hazards of storing this material indefinitely. In addition, the disarmament is only brought to a successful end when the Plutonium isn’t available for the production of new weapons anymore. We propose a disruptive approach for Plutonium disposition and demonstrate the feasibility in a neutronic study. Burning of weapon-grade Plutonium in a molten salt fast reactor is significantly more efficient than in the studied other reactors, while efficient process design has the potential to reduce the security concerns significantly. The proposed system could turn about 1.25 tons of weapon-grade Plutonium into electric energy worth £ 0.5 to 1 billion/year, depending on the electricity price while avoiding the hassle and eliminating the risk of high security Plutonium storage. In conclusion, burning of the weapon-grade Plutonium resulting from disarmament could be an economically very attractive approach to reduce the nuclear threat.

New Waste Management Options Created by iMAGINE through Direct Operation on Spent Nuclear Fuel Feed

“…The dissolved fission products can be removed based on a variable cleaning efficiency, providing the opportunity to set this efficiency or the share of salt to be cleaned element-wise for all considered elements. The use of the described process has already been validated and used in several peerreviewed publications [14,15,25,26]. Meanwhile, the modeling and simulation quality will be significantly improved due to the new code version and the increased computational power, which allow the use of the 173 energy group cross-section set instead of the 47 group set in the earlier publications.…”

A HELIOS Based Dynamic Salt Clean-Up Study Analysing the Effects of a Plutonium Based Initial Core for IMAGINE

“…In contrast, the dissolved fission products can be removed within ZENITH based on a cleaning efficiency, providing the opportunity to set this efficiency elementwise for all considered elements. The use of the aforementioned process has already been validated and used in several peer-reviewed publications [20,23,24,25]. However, the modelling and simulation quality will be significantly improved due to the new code version and the increased computational power which allows the use of the 173 energy group cross section set instead of the 47 group set used in the earlier publications.…”

A HELIOS Based Dynamic Salt Clean-Up Study for iMAGINE

“…To improve the modelling of both procedures a new strategy has been developed, based on the use of a reduced burnup per cycle (5 GWd/tHM and 10 GWd/tHM using five burnup steps in HELIOS), coinciding with a full removal of gaseous and volatile fission products the elements 18, 35, 36, 53, 54, 85 are not carried forward through ZENITH), while the dissolved fission products can be removed, based on a cleaning efficiency providing the opportunity to set this efficiency elementwise for all considered elements. The use of the described process has already been validated and used in several peer-reviewed publication [25,28,29,30]. However, the modelling and simulation quality will be significantly improved due to the new code version and the increased computational power which allow now the use of the 173 energy group cross section set instead of the 47 group set in the earlier publications.…”