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GAO: Clarification of HLW definition could save DOE billions
A clearer definition of what constitutes high-level radioactive waste could save the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management “tens of billions of dollars” in waste management costs and accelerate its cleanup schedule by decades, according to a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
DOE-EM’s efforts to manage waste resulting from legacy spent nuclear fuel reprocessing have been hindered for decades by the ambiguity of the statutory definition of HLW as laid out in the Atomic Energy Act and Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the report states. While admitting that the DOE has taken steps to overcome this ambiguity, the GAO says that the department has not fully evaluated all available opportunities to treat and dispose of waste more economically as either transuranic or low-level radioactive waste.
R. W. Stoughton, J. Halperin, Marjorie P. Lietzke
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 6 | Number 5 | November 1959 | Pages 441-447
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE59-A25683
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Effective cutoff energies for point 1/υ absorbers inside of spherical and cylindrical cadmium filters have been calculated for thermal reactor neutrons. The neutron spectrum was assumed to consist of a Maxwellian plus a 1/E component, and the parameters varied were the thickness of filter, the Maxwellian temperature, and the Maxwellian to 1/E flux ratio. Because of the sensitivity of the effective cutoff to Maxwellian flux parameters for thin filters it is recommended that filter thicknesses of about 40 mils be used. Forty-mil filters show effective cutoffs at about 0.50 to 0.55 ev for temperatures up to about 500°A (or about 0.045 ev). Effective cutoff energies for boron filters were also calculated for purposes of comparison.