Dissolver Off-gas Hot Operations Authorization (AFCI CETE Milestone Report)
- ORNL
The head-end processing of the Coupled-End-to-End (CETE) Demonstration includes fuel receipt, fuel disassembly, exposure of fuel (e.g., by segmenting the fuel pins), voloxidation of the fuel to separate tritium, and fuel dissolution. All of these processing steps with the exception of the dissolution step will be accomplished in the Irradiated Fuels Examination Laboratory (IFEL) (Building 3525). The final headend step will be performed in the Radiochemical Engineering Development Center (Building 7920). The primary purpose of the fuel dissolution step is to prepare the solid fuel for subsequent liquid separations steps. This is accomplished by dissolving the fuel solids using nitric acid. During the dissolution process gases are evolved. Oxides of nitrogen are the primary off-gas components generated by the reactions of nitric acid and the fuel oxides however, during the dissolution and sparging of the resulting solution, iodine, C-14 as carbon dioxide, xenon, and krypton gasses are also released to the off-gas stream. The Dissolver Off-gas treatment rack provides a means of trapping these volatile fission products and other gases via various trapping media. Specifically the rack will recover iodine on a solid sorbent bed, scrub NOx in a water/acid column, scrub CO{sub 2} in a caustic scrubber column, remove moisture with solid sorbent drier beds and recover Xe and Kr using solid absorbent beds. The primary purpose of this experimental rack and the off-gas rack associated with the voloxidation equipment located at IFEL is to close the material balances around the volatile gases and to provide an understanding of the impacts of specific processing conditions on the fractions of the volatile components released from the various head-end processing steps.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE)
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC05-00OR22725
- OSTI ID:
- 970893
- Report Number(s):
- ORNL/TM-2009/168; AF5855000; NEAF300; TRN: US1001105
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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