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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.
Jim P. Wei
Nuclear Technology | Volume 46 | Number 1 | November 1979 | Pages 44-52
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT79-A32378
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A simplified interassembly heat transfer model has been developed to satisfy liquid-metal fast breeder reactor core restraint system analysis needs that explicitly treats steady-state intra-assembly and interassembly heat transfer in core assemblies. The intra-assembly heat transfer inside reactor assemblies is modeled based on application of the subchannel concept together with the use of bulk parameters for coolant velocity and coolant temperature within a subchannel. The model utilizes a tri-grid system to treat interassembly heat transfer between assemblies. Because of this special nodal scheme, a set of finite difference equations, derived from the energy equation for all the subchannels, duct wall, and gap flow, is actually a rather special system of simultaneous linear algebraic equations which have a tri-diagonal matrix form. Due to this special form, an efficient method of solution for computers is used without matrix elimination and inversion. Although this model was developed for core restraint applications, it is also well suited for the determination of core-wide coolant temperature distributions.