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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
William A. Boyd, Mark W. Fecteau
Nuclear Technology | Volume 104 | Number 2 | November 1993 | Pages 207-218
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Waste Management / Radioactive Waste Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT93-A34884
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) facility is designed to store transuranic waste that will consist mainly of surface contaminate articles and sludge. The fissile material in the waste is predominately 239Pu. The waste is grouped into two categories: contact-handled waste, which will be stored in 55-gal steel drums or in steel boxes, and remote-handled waste, which will be stored in specially designed cylindrical steel canisters. To show that criticality safety will be acceptable, criticality analyses were performed to demonstrate that a large number of containers with limiting loadings of fissile material could be stored at the site and meet a keff limit of 0.95. Criticality analyses based on the classic worst-case moderated plutonium sphere approach would severely limit the capacity for storage of waste at the facility. Therefore, these analyses use realistic or credible worst-case assumptions to better represent the actual storage situation without compromising the margin of safety. Numerous sensitivity studies were performed to determine the importance of various parameters on the criticality of the configuration. It was determined that the plutonium loading has the dominant effect on the system reactivity. Nearly all other reactivity variations from the sensitivity studies were found to be relatively small. The analysis shows that criticality of the contacthandled waste storage drums and boxes and the remotehandled canisters is prevented by restrictions on maximum fissile loading per container and on the size of handling/storage areas. Analysis has shown that the keff limit of 0.95 is met with the storage of large loadings offissile material at the WIPP facility, while credible or realistic assumptions still provide a large degree of conservatism.