Environment and Radwaste Management
Radioactive waste management should be recognized as an issue that is significant not only to the fusion community, but also to the global environment. As fusion energy becomes a contributor to the world's energy supply by the mid 21st century, managing the many thousand cubic meters of active materials after plant decommissioning represents a real challenge to the fusion industry and cannot be relegated to the back-end as only a disposal issue. Scenarios for radwaste management include disposal in geological repositories, recycling and reuse within the nuclear industry, and clearance or release to the commercial market if the materials contain traces of radioactivity. Most fusion plants generate Class-C low-level waste, requiring near-surface burial.
The wealth of experience accumulated over the past 30-40 years of fusion power plant studies must be forged in a new strategy to reshape all aspects of handling the continual stream of radioactive materials during operation and after plant decommissioning. With tighter environmental controls and the political difficulty of building new repositories worldwide, the disposal option should be replaced with more environmentally attractive scenarios, such as:
- Recycle and reuse within the nuclear industry
- Clear or release to the commercial market if materials contain traces of radioactivity.
There is a growing international effort in support of this new trend. The introduction of the clearance category for slightly radioactive materials is an important recent development to accommodate most decommissioned waste at a cost much lower than that for traditional low-level waste produced by the majority of U.S. power plants.
In the late 1990s, we introduced the clearance option to various design concepts. The majority of the in-vessel components cannot be cleared from regulatory control even after an extended storage of 100-500 y, according to the clearance guidelines by the IAEA and the U.S. NRC. The bioshield, cryostat, and individual magnet constituents qualify for clearance. Representing 75-80% of the total waste volume, the cleared materials save a substantial disposal cost and, more importantly, free ample space in the repositories for other radwaste.
Just recently, we applied the recycling approach to the non-clearable in-vessel components (blanket, shield, and vacuum vessel). All components can potentially be recycled using conventional and advanced remote handling equipment. The online removal of specific radionuclides during recycling prolongs the reusability of materials. Transmutation of these byproducts in fusion devices is one of the means being explored to avoid their geological burial.
As an important goal for U.S. power plant studies, the national ARIES project is committed to radwaste minimization. The focus on compact devices with radwaste reduction mechanisms (such as blanket segmentation and well-optimized components) contributed most significantly to the factor of 2-4 difference in radwaste volume between recent ARIES plants and previous designs developed prior to 1995.
To make fusion a viable energy source with minimal environmental impact, we highly recommend minimizing the radwaste by design, and recycling/clearing all fusion components, if economically and technologically feasible, avoiding the disposal approach, meaning no long-term radwaste burden on future generations.
Our recent activity placed UW as the leading U.S. institute for radwaste
management assessments. This activity drew the attention of our colleagues
in Europe, Russia, Japan, and S. Korea,
requesting collaboration with UW in this unique area of research.
Publications
UWFDM-1232 Recycling Issues Facing Target and RTL Materials of Inertial Fusion Designs; L. El-Guebaly, P. Wilson, M. Sawan, D. Henderson, A. Varuttamaseni and the ARIES and Z-Pinch Teams, July 2004 [presented at the 15th International Symposium on Heavy Ion Inertial Fusion, 7-11 June 2004, Princeton, NJ; Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Journal, Section A, 544 (2005) 104-110]. (12 pages, 652 kB)
UWFDM-1284 Recycling and Clearance of the Slightly Activated RTLs of the 2005 Z-Pinch Design; L.A. El-Guebaly, P. Wilson, M.E. Sawan, October 2005. (10 pages, 725 kB)
UWFDM-1183 Recycling of IFE Target Materials versus One-Shot Use Scenario: Key Issues and Preferred Option; L.A. El-Guebaly, P. Wilson, D. Henderson, A. Varuttamaseni and the ARIES Team, November 2002. (24 pages, 978 kB)
UWFDM-1231 Status of US, EU, and IAEA Clearance Standards and Estimates of Fusion Radwaste Classifications; L. El-Guebaly, P. Wilson, D. Paige, and the ARIES and Z-Pinch Teams, December 2004. (18 pages, 907 kB)
Target Recycling: Problem Definition and Preliminary Analysis for ARIES-IFE-HIB; L. El-Guebaly, October 2001 [ARIES E-Meeting, 24 October 2001].
(16 pages, 221 kB)
UWFDM-1147 Activation, Decay Heat, and Waste Disposal Analyses for the ARIES-AT Power Plant; D. Henderson, L. El-Guebaly, P. Wilson, A. Abdou, and the ARIES Team, October 2000 [presented at the 14th Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy, October 15-19, 2000, Park City UT]. (7 pages, 190 kB)
UWFDM-925 Activation and Waste Disposal of the ARIES-II Tokamak Fusion Power Reactor; H.Y. Khater, October 1993 [presented at 15th IEEE/NPSS Symposium on Fusion Engineering, 11-14 October 1993, Hyannis MA]. (7 pages, 816 kB)
Some Technological Problems of Fusion Materials Management; Boris Kolbasov, Laila El-Guebaly, Vladimir Khripunov, Youji Someya, Kenji Tobita, Massimo Zucchetti, September 20, 2013 [Presented at 11th ISFNT, Barcelona, Spain, September 16-20, 2013. To be published in Fusion Engineering and Design.]. ( available online )
UWFDM-1131 Nuclear Power Without Radioactive Waste - The Promise of Lunar Helium-3; G.L. Kulcinski and H.H. Schmitt, July 2000 [presented at the Second Annual Lunar Development Conference, ``Return to the Moon II'', 20-21 July 2000, Las Vegas NV]. (9 pages, 228 kB)
UWFDM-1420 Developments in 3-D Nuclear Analysis: Model Visualization and Robust Activation Analysis; Lucas Mynsberge, January 2014 [M.S. thesis]. (114 pages, 2.4 MB)
Recent Accomplishments and Future Directions in U.S. Fusion Safety & Environmental Program; D. Petti et al., July 10-13, 2006 [8th IAEA TM on Fusion Power Plant Safety].
UWFDM-691 The Impact of D-3He Fusion Reactors on Waste Disposal; W.F. Vogelsang and H.Y Khater, May 1987 [published in Fusion Engineering and Design 5 (1998) 367-377]. (13 pages, 734 kB)
UWFDM-1279 Assessment of the Activation, Decay Heat, and Waste Disposal of a Dual Coolant Lithium Lead Test Blanket Module for ITER; M.Z. Youssef and M.E. Sawan, September 2005 [presented at the 21st IEEE/NPSS Symposium on Fusion Engineering (SOFE), 26-29 September 2005, Knoxville TN]. (8 pages, 1.2 MB)
UWFDM-1174 Comparison of Radwaste Volume and Hazard in Liquid Wall and Conventional Solid Wall Concepts; M.Z. Youssef, M.E. Sawan, H.Y. Khater, January 2002 [Presented at the 19th IEEE/NPSS Symposium on Fusion Engineering (SOFE), 22-25 January 2002, Atlantic City NJ]. (7 pages, 724 kB)
UWFDM-1196 Component Lifetime Comparison and Waste Volume in CLiFF Sn/Flibe and Sn/LiPb Blankets; M. Youssef and M. Sawan, April 2002 [presented at the 6th International Symposium on Fusion Nuclear Technology, 7-12 April 2002, San Diego CA; published in Fusion Engineering and Design, vol. 63-64, pp. 277-283 (2002)].
UWFDM-1195 Radwaste Volume in Lithium and Flibe Thick Liquid Wall and Comparison to Conventional SW Concepts; M. Youssef and M. Sawan, April 2002 [presented at the 6th International Symposium on Fusion Nuclear Technology, 7-12 April 2002, San Diego CA; published in Fusion Engineering and Design, vol. 63-64, pp. 263-269 (2002)].
Recent Advances in Fusion Radioactive Material Studies; M. Zucchetti, L. Di Pace, L. El-Guebaly, J.-H. Han, B. N. Kolbasov, V. Massaut, Y. Someya, K. Tobita, and M. Desecures, October 2013 [presented at 27th Symposium on Fusion Technology, Sept. 24-28, 2012, Liège, Belgium; published in Fusion Engineering and Design, 88, Issues 6-8 (October 2013) 652-656.].
UWFDM-1286 The Feasibility of Recycling and Clearance of Active Materials from Fusion Power Plants; M. Zucchetti, L.A. El-Guebaly, R.A. Forrest, T.D. Marshall, N.P. Taylor, K. Tobita, November 2005 [submitted to the 12th International Conference on Fusion Reactor Materials, 4-9 December 2005, Santa Barbara CA; published in J. Nucl. Matls. 367-370 (2007) 1355-1360]. (12 pages, 1.2 MB)