Processing and Disposition of Special Actinide Target Materials - 13138
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory, P.O. Box 2008, Oak Ridge, TN 37831 (United States)
- Savannah River National Laboratory (United States)
The Department of Energy (DOE) manages an inventory of materials that contains a range of long-lived radioactive isotopes that were produced from the 1960's through the 1980's by irradiating targets in high-flux reactors at the Savannah River Site (SRS) to produce special heavy isotopes for DOE programmatic use, scientific research, and industrial and medical applications. Among the products were californium-252, heavy curium (including Cm-246 through Cm-248), and plutonium-242 and -244. Many of the isotopes are still in demand today, and they can be recovered from the remaining targets previously irradiated at SRS or produced from the recovered isotopes. Should the existing target materials be discarded, the plutonium (Pu) and curium (Cm) isotopes cannot be replaced readily with existing production sources. Some of these targets are stored at SRS, while other target material is stored at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) at several stages of processing. The materials cannot be stored in their present form indefinitely. Their long-term management involves processing items for beneficial use and/or for disposition, using storage and process facilities at SRS and ORNL. Evaluations are under way for disposition options for these materials, and demonstrations of improved flow sheets to process the materials are being conducted at ORNL and the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL). The disposition options and a management evaluation process have been developed. Processing demonstrations and evaluations for these unique materials are under way. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- WM Symposia, 1628 E. Southern Avenue, Suite 9-332, Tempe, AZ 85282 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 22224916
- Report Number(s):
- INIS-US-13-WM-13138; TRN: US14V0357045871
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: WM2013: Waste Management Conference: International collaboration and continuous improvement, Phoenix, AZ (United States), 24-28 Feb 2013; Other Information: Country of input: France; 4 refs.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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