As nuclear energy grows in the United States and around the world, the expansion
of the nuclear fuel cycle is inevitable. All currently deployed commercial reprocessing
plants are based on the Plutonium - Uranium Extraction (PUREX) process. However,
this process is not implemented in the U.S. for a variety of reasons, one being that it is
considered by some as a proliferation risk. The 2001 Nuclear Energy Policy report
recommended that the U.S. "develop reprocessing and treatment technologies that are
cleaner, more efficient, less waste-intensive, and more proliferation-resistant." The
Uranium Extraction (UREX+) reprocessing technique has been developed to reach these
goals. However, in order for UREX+ to be considered for commercial implementation, a
safeguards approach is needed to show that a commercially sized UREX+ facility can be
safeguarded to current international standards.
A detailed safeguards approach for a UREX+1a reprocessing facility has been
developed. The approach includes the use of nuclear material accountancy (MA),
containment and surveillance (C/S) and solution monitoring (SM). Facility information
was developed for a hypothesized UREX+1a plant with a throughput of 1000 Metric
Tons Heavy Metal (MTHM) per year. Safeguard goals and safeguard measures to be
implemented were established. Diversion and acquisition pathways were considered;
however, the analysis focuses mainly on diversion paths. The detection systems used in
the design have the ability to provide near real-time measurement of special fissionable
material in feed, process and product streams. Advanced front-end techniques for the
quantification of fissile material in spent nuclear fuel were also considered. The
economic and operator costs of these systems were not considered. The analysis shows
that the implementation of these techniques result in significant improvements in the
ability of the safeguards system to achieve the objective of timely detection of the diversion of a significant quantity of nuclear material from the UREX+1a reprocessing
facility and to provide deterrence against such diversion by early detection.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2010-05-270 |
| Date | 2010 May 1900 |
| Creators | Feener, Jessica S. |
| Contributors | Charlton, William S. |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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