Savannah River reprocessing plant

U.S. plants. The principal U.S. reprocessing plants are listed in Table 10.3, together with their main process features. All use some form of the Purex process. In 1979, the only ones operating were the Savannah River and Idaho plants of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The Hanford plant had been used primarily for recovery of plutonium and uranium from irradiated natural uranium, but was versatile and had been used, for example, for Thorex... 

Neutralized waste may develop another problem. Sludge will be formed that will carry most of the radioactivity and will eventually settle. That happened at Hanford, Savannah River, and at the Nuclear Fuel Services plant at West Valley, New York, the first commercial reprocessing plant, which is now out of operation. Considerable problems will have to be solved there to transfer the waste entirely from the storage tanks to a final treatment facility. 

High-level radioactive waste (HLW) will be converted from an alkaline slurry to a durable borosilicate glass in the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) at the Savannah River Plant (SRP) in South Carolina [17]. This waste is the residue from thirty years of reprocessing of irradiated nuclear fuels for national defense purposes and is currently stored in large carbon-steel tanks. 

Only 4-5 % of the utilized nuclear fuel worldwide is reprocessed. Commercial, nonmilitary, reprocessing of nuclear fuel takes place in France, Japan, India and the United Kingdom. Other reprocessing plants defined as defense-related are in operation and producing waste but without discharges. For example in the USA, at the Savannah River Plant and the Hanford complex, about 83 000 m and 190 000 m, respectively, of high-level liquid waste was in storage in 1985. 

Variants of the Purex (Pu-U Reduction Extraction) process are the most widely used plutonium-reprocessing schemes worldwide. Purex on the industrial scale began at the US Savannah River Plant in 1954 and replaced the Redox process at the Hanford works in 1956 every country that has produced significant quantities of plutonium has exploited the method. In Purex, the organic extractant is tributyl phosphate (TBP). In addition to optimum com-plexation properties for nuclear analytes of interest, TBP has a low aqueous solubility and is chemically and radiolytically stable. The density of TBP (0.98 g/cm ) is so close to that of water that it is common to dilute it in a lower density solvent. It is completely miscible with common organic solvents (e.g., kerosene, n-dodecane) at ordinary temperatures. 

During the eight years that the Babcock ft Wilcox Test Reactor (BAWTR) operated, five batches of spent fuel elements were shipped to the reprocessing plant at Savannah River. A typical batch contained 25 fuel elements (10 kg (rf U), which were shipped in a lead cask. 

Smaller scale reprocessing plants are operating in Japan (FBR fuel at Tokai), in India (CANDU fuel at Tarapur and FBR fuel at Kalpakkam) and in China (LWR fuel at Lanzhou). It should also be noted that noncivilian (weapons) plutonium is used for MOX fuel fabrication (after reprocessing) in the United States (LWR-MOX fuel fabricated at Savannah River) and in Russia (LWR-MOX fuel fabricated at Tomsk). 

Kantelo et al. (1982) studied the distribution of in the terrestrial environment surrounding the Savannah River reprocessing plant after 25 years of operation. A conservative (worst case basis) calculation yielded an annual dose from of 1.6 mrem to an adult thyroid. 

---