Scoping Evaluations of Candidate Approaches for an Integrated Waste Management Strategy

摘要

To support the long-term growth of nuclear power as a significant portion of U.S. generating capacity, the U.S. Department of Energy is exploring options for an integrated nuclear waste management strategy. This strategy uses partitioning and transmutation processing of spent fuel to create transmutation fuels and targets to be burned in power reactors and/or accelerator-driven systems, thereby eliminating the most problematic components of nuclear waste. This concept is known as a multi-tier or multi-strata system. The multi-tier approaches evaluated in this study include systems in which plutonium (with uranium and/or minor actinides in some approaches) first passes through first-tier thermal-spectrum power reactors, with the residuals being subsequently passed to second-tier fast-spectrum transmut-ers. Single-tier systems, in which all transuranics are fissioned in a single machine, are also evaluated. The choice of technologies affects transmutation performance. Because of these technology choices, this report evaluates seven different two-tier reactor and fuel technologies, along with a single-tier fast-reactor system and a single-tier accelerator-driven system.