Comparison of Environmental Impacts for PWR-UO{sub 2}, PWR-MOX and FBR

Conference · Sun Jul 01 04:00:00 EDT 2007

OSTI ID:20979716

Bouvier, Erwan; Ahn, Joonhong ^[1]; Ikegami, Tetsuo ^[2]

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1. Department of Nuclear Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 (United States)
2. Advanced Nuclear System Research and Development Directorate, Japan Atomic Energy Agency, 4002 Narita-cho, Oarai-machi, Higashi-ibaraki-gun, Ibaraki, 311-1393 (Japan)

The environmental impact of different fuel cycles based on Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) and Fast Reactors (FR) has been assessed and compared. The study has been carried out by coupling two models: a waste conditioning model that determines the composition of the vitrified High Level Waste (HLW) and a radionuclide transport model that takes into account the release of radionuclide through the Engineered Barrier Systems (EBS) after failure of the canisters of a water-saturated repository. It follows from the study that the environmental impact per electricity generated of a PWRMOX system is substantially higher than the ones observed for PWR-UO{sub 2} and FRs. These differences are to be related to the waste conditioning constraints that determine the dilution of waste radionuclides within the borosilicate glass. A removal of the high heat emitting radionuclides such as Cm-244 is to that regard advisable. Numerical results show that the PWR cases studied here are more sensitive than FR systems to geologic repository characteristics such as the Canister Failure Time (CFT). For short CFT, this relatively high sensitivity is mainly due to Am-241. (authors)

• Research Organization: American Nuclear Society, 555 North Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, IL 60526 (United States)
• OSTI ID: 20979716
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE WASTES FROM NUCLEAR FACILITIES
AMERICIUM 241
BOROSILICATE GLASS
COMPARATIVE EVALUATIONS
CONTAINERS
CURIUM 244
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS
FAST REACTORS
FUEL CYCLE
HIGH-LEVEL RADIOACTIVE WASTES
PWR TYPE REACTORS
RADIONUCLIDE MIGRATION
URANIUM DIOXIDE
VITRIFICATION