Thermal oxide reprocessing plant

Thermal oxide reprocessing plant, 6, 885 Thermal reactor fuels, 6,926 dissolution, 6,927 irradiated... 

Phillips, C. 1999. The thermal oxide reprocessing plant at Sellafield Four years of active operation of the solvent extraction plant. ISEC 99 Conference on Solvent Extraction for the 21st Century, July, Barcelona, Spain. 

From ref. 11 THORP = Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant. 

Two reprocessing plants are in operation at Sellafield. The Magnox reprocessing plant, which commenced operation in 1964, processes irradiated uranium (U) metal fuel from UK and overseas Magnox reactors. The THORP (Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant), which commenced operation in 1994, reprocesses enriched uranium oxide fuel principally from Light Water Reactors (LWR) in Europe and Japan and Advanced Gas Cooled Reactors (AGR) in the UK. 

AREVA La Hague plant in France has two production lines with a production level equivalent to 450 tWh of electricity per year, which produce 1700 tonnes of spent fuel per year. In 2011, the plant processed 1045 toimes of spent fuel. Same amounts of spent fuel (1734 tonnes of spent fuel per year) are reprocessed in SeUafield in the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant. 

HNA was incorporated into many nuclear fuel reprocessing plants in the early 1970s replacing the ferrous sulfamate and hydroxylamine sulfate for plutonium reduction because it possessed the proper Pu(IV) to Pu(III) reduction attributes and the gaseous reaction products N2, N2O, and water contributed to the minimization of the volume of solid wastes produced. The French PUREX process at the La Hague site safely uses a mixture of HNA and nitric acid for the reductive stripping phase of plutonium. The British also used HNA in the thermal oxide reprocessing plant (THORP) for over several years (Barney, 1998). 

On 20 April 2005, British Nuclear Group Sellalield Limited (BNGSL) discovered a leak from a pipe that supplied highly radioactive liquor to an accountancy tank in a part of the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) at Sellafield, known as the feed clarification cell . The incident was categorized by BNGSL as 3 on the International Nuclear Event Scale. 

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