Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory Site Report on the Production and Use of Recycled Uranium

摘要

Recent allegations regarding radiation exposure to radionuclides present in recycled uranium sent to the gaseous diffusion plants prompted the Department of Energy to undertake a system-wide study of recycled uranium. Of particular interest, were the flowpaths from site to site operations and facilities in which exposure to plutonium, neptunium and technetium could occur, and to the workers that could receive a significant radiation dose from handling recycled uranium. The Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory site report is primarily concerned with two locations. Recycled uranium was produced at the Idaho Chemical Processing Plant where highly enriched uranium was recovered from spent fuel. The other facility is the Specific Manufacturing Facility (SMC) where recycled, depleted uranium is manufactured into shapes for use by their customer. The SMC is a manufacturing facility that uses depleted uranium metal as a raw material that is then rolled and cut into shapes. There are no chemical processes that might concentrate any of the radioactive contaminant species. Recyclable depleted uranium from the SMC facility is sent to a private metallurgical facility for recasting. Analyses on the recast billets indicate that there is no change in the concentrations of transuranics as a result of the recasting process. The Idaho Chemical Processing Plant was built to recover high-enriched uranium from spent nuclear fuel from test reactors. The facility processed diverse types of fuel which required uniquely different fuel dissolution processes. The dissolved fuel was passed through three cycles of solvent extraction which resulted in a concentrated uranyl nitrate product. For the first half of the operating period, the uranium was shipped as the concentrated solution. For the second half of the operating period the uranium solution was thermally converted to granular, uranium trioxide solids. The dose reconstruction project has evaluated work exposure and exposure to the public as the result of normal operations and accidents that occurred at the INEEL. As a result of these studies, the maximum effective dose equivalent from site activities did not exceed seventeen percent of the natural background in Eastern Idaho. There was no year in which the radiation dose to the public exceeded the applicable limits for that year. Worker exposure to recycled uranium was minimized by engineering features that reduced the possibility of direct exposure.