Research reactor spent fuel inventory

As shown in Table II, the Foreign Research Reactor Spent Fuel Acceptance Programme created by USDOE has allowed a number of countries of the region to ship back to the USA 392 fuel assemblies, an important part of the US-origin RRSF inventory. 

The new pool is designed to store spent fuel from all operating research reactors in Argentina RA-1 (40 kW), RA-3 (10 MW) and RA-6 (500 kW). Nevertheless, the RA-6 HEU fuel inventory will be shipped back to the USA within the framework of the USDOE Foreign Research Reactor Spent Fuel Acceptance Programme. It is also expected that irradiated HEU fuel assemblies and fuel elements from the RA-2 critical assembly will be shipped back to the USA. 

It is well known that repositories studied so far have been for power reactor fuel with initial enrichment of 4% or less, being about 1% the remnant enrichment in the spent fuel inventory. Repeating these studies for research reactor fuel, including the environmental impact assessment, would be enormously expensive. Besides, criticality considerations and the susceptibility of the materials to degradation lead to the conclusion that direct disposal of RRSF cannot be considered a viable option. 

In the TRIGA Mark III nuclear research reactor of Mexico, the spent fuel is located in aluminium storage racks hanging on the reactor pool liner. The racks, shown in Fig. 12, have enough capacity for the total inventory of the installation 33 fresh, 88 in-core and 64 spent fuel elements. 

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