Overall assessment of actinide partitioning and transmutation for waste management purposes

A program to establish the technical feasibility and incentives for partitioning (i.e., recovering) actinides from fuel cycle wastes and then transmuting them in power reactors to shorter-lived or stable nuclides has recently been concluded at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The feasibility was established by experimentally investigating the reduction that can be practicably achieved in the actinide content of the wastes sent to a geologic repository, and the incentives for implementing this concept were defined by determining the incremental costs, risks, and benefits. Eight US Department of Energy laboratories and three private companies participated in the program over its 3-year duration. A reference fuel cycle was chosen based on a self-generated plutonium recycle PWR, and chemical flowsheets based on solvent extraction and ion-exchange techniques were generated that have the potential to reduce actinides in fuel fabrication and reprocessing plant wastes to less than 0.25% of those in the spent fuel. Waste treatment facilities utilizing these flowsheets were designed conceptually, and their costs were estimated. Finally, the short-term (contemporary) risks from fuel cycle operations and long-term (future) risks from deep geologic disposal of the wastes were estimated for cases with and without partitioning and transmutation. It was concluded that, while both more » actinide partitioning from wastes and transmutation in power reactors appear to be feasible using currently identified and studied technology, implementation of this concept cannot be justified because of the small long-term benefits and substantially increased costs of the concept. « less