Savannah River Site’s H-Canyon Facility: “A National Asset with New Mission”

摘要

For over fifty years, the H Canyon facility, including HB Line, has performed remotelyoperated radiochemical separations of irradiated targets to produce materials for nationaldefense. Although the materials production mission has ended, the facility continues toplay an important role in the stabilization and safe disposition of proliferable nuclearmaterials.H Canyon offers a unique combination of capabilities, equipment, and infrastructure thatis not available anywhere else in the United States or internationally. The facility canreceive and dissolve irradiated nuclear fuel, separating and recovering many usefulproducts in a series of process cells using existing equipment. The flexibility of thefacility design allows for equipment to be replaced or reconfigured accommodatingchanging process requirements. HB Line contains a series of shielded glovebox lines thatallow “hands-on” processing, including purification, solidification, and packaging ofsmaller quantities of plutonium and other minor actinides or special products.The H Canyon facility has been given new mission direction involving excess plutoniumprocessing, preparation for processing potential vulnerable spent nuclear fuel from wetstorage, and research and development of vacuum salt distillation processing.