Spent Fuel Treatment at INL's Fuel Conditioning Facility

INL researchers recently published an article on the history of spent fuel treatment at the labs’s Fuel Conditioning Facility. It’s available by subscription only at ScienceDirect –publication screenshot provided below.

Once nuclear fuel reaches the end of its useful life within a reactor core, it’s removed for final disposition or recycling, commonly known as reprocessing. This involves a range of physical and chemical processes designed to prepare the spent fuel for its next stage. Spent fuel is treated using either aqueous methods, where the fuel is dissolved and its elements separated within a water-based chemical solution, or nonaqueous methods such as pyroprocessing, which uses high-temperature chemistry, molten salts, liquid metals and gases.

From right to left, Michael Patterson, Skyler Pettengill, Holli Harrington, Chase Wren, Kevin Henderson, Cory Kynaston, Dustin Harral, Ryan Searle and Guy Fredrickson on the working floor of the FCF argon-atmosphere hot cell.

From right to left, Holli Harrington and Chase Wren, operating the Mk-IV electrorefiner to electrorefine EBR-II used driver fuel as part of the process to make high assay low enriched uranium (HALEU) reguli.

After INL’s Experimental Breeder Reactor-II shut down in 1994, its spent fuel has been treated using pyroprocessing. Since 1996, staff members at our Fuel Conditioning Facility have treated this spent fuel and recovered high assay low enriched uranium metal. Pyroprocessing techniques have been developed for a variety of nuclear fuel types. The goal is providing material for fuels with enhanced proliferation resistance and the ability to power nuclear energy systems optimized for increased efficiency. In the future, pyroprocessing techniques may be applied to reprocessing or treating spent fuel from advanced reactor designs such as small modular reactors.