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The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
Longcheng Liu, Ivars Neretnieks
Nuclear Technology | Volume 137 | Number 3 | March 2002 | Pages 228-240
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT02-A3270
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this study, we develop a mechanism-based model to take into account most of the important processes that may influence the dissolution behavior of spent fuel and subsequently the release behavior of nuclides within a defective canister in a final repository for high-level nuclear waste. The model is, in essence, a redox-controlled reactive transport model that provides a description of the mass transport of multiple species involved in both local equilibrium and kinetically controlled reactions in the system. The complexity of the kinetics of the various redox reactions involved and the requirement of the long-term prediction, however, make numerical implementation of the fully coupled model computationally inefficient. A series of scoping calculations was performed to highlight the local characteristics and behaviors of the system, and to provide a basis for refinement of the reactive transport model. The results indicate that the rapid buildup of hydrogen within the system is mainly attributed to corrosion of the cast-iron insert that primarily occurs under anaerobic conditions, rather than to radiolysis of water. The system that is rapidly in equilibrium with 50 bar hydrogen would then keep pH constant throughout the system. In addition, simulations suggest that reduction of dissolved hexavalent uranium by ferrous iron adsorbed onto the corrosion products and by dissolved H2 are the most important mechanisms to retard the release of uranium out of the canister. More importantly, it is found that the pseudo stationary state approximation may well be applied to the system. This greatly simplifies the numerical implementation of the reactive transport model.
