Essential elements of modeling gas generation from well defined plutonium materials
- Mark T.
- Daniel
Processing of excess plutonium oxide (and related) materials intended for long-term storage is addressed in DOE standard 3013-2000. The essential elements addressed by this standard are eliminating or reducing to an acceptable level the entities that lead to gas evolution and consequent pressurization of the intended storage container system. Based upon the need to adequately understand and quantify these relevant parameters we briefly describe the current scientific knowledge of gas evolution from such systems. These associated research efforts have included fundamental kinetic and thermodynamic studies of water interactions at actinide oxide surfaces, radiolytic reactions of adsorbed water, interfacial reactions of hydrogen and oxygen, and radiolytic helium production. Utilizing, where possible, experimental parameters for many of the aforementioned processes we have developed a mathematical model with a minimum number of essential components that successfully models gas generation from well-defined PuO{sub 2} materials with known amounts of deliberately added water. In this work we verify this model against real pressure versus time data (described at greater length in another manuscript in these conference proceedings) and subsequently assure the safety envelope of design criteria for both short- and long-term storage and transportation of these material classes. These modeling results predict pressures and gas phase mole fractions over well-defined DOE 3013 container test cases well in advance of actual long-term surveillance information and provide confidence in safe storage of plutonium oxide material classes.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Laboratory
- Sponsoring Organization:
- DOE
- OSTI ID:
- 976222
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-02-4349
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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