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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Spent fuel transfer project completed at INL
Work crews at Idaho National Laboratory have transferred 40 spent nuclear fuel canisters into long-term storage vaults, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has reported.
J. H. Horton, E. L. Albenesius
Nuclear Technology | Volume 30 | Number 1 | July 1976 | Pages 86-88
Technical Note | Radioactive Waste | doi.org/10.13182/NT76-A31627
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A series of simple laboratory experiments was conducted to test the feasibility of separation of plutonium-contaminated soil into plutonium-rich and depleted fractions. The purpose of the separation is to reduce the costs of managing plutonium-contaminated soil by separating a large fraction of the soil that can be disposed of as noncontaminated soil. Water-scrubbing (agitation) and washing of a sample of soil from the Savannah River Plant burial ground separated out a clay-silt fraction containing ∼95% of the plutonium, but comprising only one-third of the total soil; the remaining two-thirds of the soil was a sand that contained only ∼5% of the total plutonium. The technique appears to be adaptable to commercial sand scrubbing and classifying equipment, and should be generally applicable to soils of high quartz sand content such as the clayey sands typical of the coastal plain of the southeastern United States, but verification with other soils will require similar laboratory tests.