A Potential Method for Stabilization and Packaging of Damaged Naval Spent Fuel

Abstract

One of the primary obstacles to the timely decommissioning of Russian nuclear-powered submarines is the disposition of spent fuel arising from their reactors. Most Russian submarines had two reactors and there were a variety of reactor/fuel designs evaluated in the late 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. As these first and second generation submarines are being retired from service, several factors are contributing to the bottleneck of spent fuel disposition. First, the capability of the PUREX reprocessing system at Mayak is limited in size (previously stated as no more than ten cores per year), in type of fuel, and to only those cores that have not experienced significant degradation through accident or age deterioration. Second, the transportation system to ship the fuel to Mayak, either from the North or Far East, is seemingly incapable of the logistics required for a massive campaign for over 200 cores worth of fuel. Lastly, even if the Mayak and transportation obstacles could be overcome, the cost of reprocessing this large quantity of fuel by Mayak cannot now be absorbed by either the Navy budget or the Minatom budget.