A Python Package for Fuel Cycle and Waste Management Analysis - 19545

Conference · Mon Jul 01 00:00:00 EDT 2019

OSTI ID:23005404

Atz, Milos; Fratoni, Massimiliano ^[1]

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1. Department of Nuclear Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, 4155 Etcheverry Hall, MC1730, Berkeley, CA, USA 94720-1730 (United States)

The future of nuclear power utilization in the United States may involve a transition from the once-through light water reactor fuel cycle to a so-called advanced fuel cycle. An advanced fuel cycle may offer improvements in natural resource utilization, reactor safety, and environmental impact. In addition, adoption of an advanced fuel cycle will result in changes in the amount, composition, and disposal of the nuclear wastes they produce. Characteristics intrinsic to the wastes themselves, such as mass and radioactivity at specific times, were used as waste management metrics in the Department of Energy 2014 Fuel Cycle Evaluation and Screening (FCES) study. Binning of these metrics informed fuel cycle according to relative potential benefit. However, waste properties alone cannot qualify management strategy. Therefore, comparing fuel cycles from the perspective of waste management can provide additional insights. To that end, an object-oriented Python package has been developed to perform fuel cycle waste management calculations. The package, named nwpy (short for Nuclear Waste analysis in Python), mimics the mass flow operations reported in the FCES study and interfaces with the ORIGEN-S code to assess metric data as reported in the FCES. In addition, this Python package determines the loading of waste streams into forms suitable for final disposal in a geological repository and uses such data for repository performance assessment. This work describes the Python package methodology, assumptions, and capabilities. As input data, the package requires information about the fuel cycle such as the mass of fuel discharged, the cooling time between reactor discharge and subsequent operations, and the separations process efficiencies and waste forms it produces. In addition, the isotopic composition of the reactor discharge stream, such as that available from the FCES database, is required. With that, it can perform prescribed mass flow and decay operations throughout the back end of the fuel cycle, the latter carried out by the ORIGEN-S code distributed with the SCALE6.2 software suite. The result is time-dependent data characterizing the waste on a per-package basis. Package loading for waste streams depends on the stream form (i.e. UNF vs. HLW, or glass HLW from aqueous reprocessing vs. ceramic HLW from electrochemical processing) and is based on literature review and engineering assumption. As an example of the application of the code, calculations for the areal footprint of direct-contact repositories for different fuel cycles is shown. Development is ongoing, and the package is expected to grow incorporating capabilities for waste management analyses such as waste transportation and radionuclide transport through the biosphere. (authors)

• Research Organization: WM Symposia, Inc., PO Box 27646, 85285-7646 Tempe, AZ (United States)
• OSTI ID: 23005404
• Report Number(s): INIS-US-21-WM-19545; TRN: US21V1331045738
• Resource Relation: Conference: WM2019: 45. Annual Waste Management Conference, Phoenix, AZ (United States), 3-7 Mar 2019; Other Information: Country of input: France; 24 refs.; available online at: https://www.xcdsystem.com/wmsym/2019/index.html
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE WASTES, AND NON-RADIOACTIVE WASTES FROM NUCLEAR FACILITIES
97 MATHEMATICAL METHODS AND COMPUTING
CERAMICS
COMPUTER CODES
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
COOLING TIME
ELECTROCHEMISTRY
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS
FUEL CYCLE
ISOTOPE RATIO
METRICS
NUCLEAR FUELS
PERFORMANCE
RADIOACTIVITY
RADIOISOTOPES
RADIONUCLIDE MIGRATION
REPROCESSING
TIME DEPENDENCE
USA
WASTE FORMS
WASTE TRANSPORTATION
WATER COOLED REACTORS
WATER MODERATED REACTORS