Experts appreciated the back end solutions presented by Rosatom’s Mining and Chemical Plant in Zheleznogorsk, (Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia).
The Mining and Chemical Plant is Rosatom’s leading subsidiary specializing in the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle (storage and reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel and fabrication of MOX fuel).
The Dry Storage at the Mining and Chemical Plant is the only air-cooled SNF storage facility in the world. Cooling with air is much safer and more efficient than SNF storage technologies used abroad.
Later this year, the Mining and Chemical Plant will launch an advanced pilot center to test SNF management technologies, which will be used to close the nuclear fuel cycle. A specific feature of these technologies is that they will produce absolutely no liquid low-activity radioactive waste.
Construction of the pilot center goes full tilt. Motor roads and railways are built to the cleared site, followed by the piping and cables. A foundation has been laid for office facilities. Preparatory work will be finished by the end of July to give a start to the construction of pilot center buildings. A fuel fabrication and re-fabrication facility (FRF) is the first of them.
3D modeling is used to design all the facilities and develop architectural plans and structural solutions. 4D Building Information Models are applied to link individual 3D buildings, structures and assemblies with the time schedule and equipment properties.
FRF equipment design runs in parallel with 3D and 4D modeling. The fuel fabrication and re-fabrication facility will house the process of carbothermal synthesis of mixed uranium and plutonium nitrides, and production of MNUP pellets, fuel rods and fuel assemblies.
The Mining and Chemical Plant has a unique opportunity to prove in practice that reprocessing of nuclear materials can be environmentally safe.
“The Mining and Chemical Plant is special as all the nuclear fuel storage, fabrication and re-fabrication facilities are concentrated on a single site. I would also like to point out the SNF reprocessing technology with no liquid waste. It is a new concept developed at the plant. It might yield much better results as compared to technologies used in France or the United Kingdom,” Olaf Nietzsche, a radiation safety expert from Germany, said at the seminar.
“Environmentalists should be all in to support fast reactors as they destroy long lived actinides, which bother the public most of all. The task turned out to be hard to solve for the French and the British. But there is no future without this technology. The task of creating MOX fuel for fast reactors is key to the future of human civilization,” said Michael Ojovan from the IAEA Department of Nuclear Energy.
