US liquid lead project to cut nuclear waste by 28 times in 30 years
A project led by researchers from Argonne National Laboratory on transmutation technologies for used nuclear fuel has been awarded a grant from the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).
The funding has been granted to the Argonne National Laboratory project under the Nuclear Energy Waste Transmutation Optimized Now (NEWTON) program, which aims to make the conversion of U.S. commercial used nuclear fuel (UNF) economically viable within 30 years.
Argonne says that transmutation technologies can reduce the mass, volume, activity, and lifespan of used nuclear fuel by converting hazardous isotopes with long life into materials that decay more quickly.
This will greatly enhance the economy and safety of nuclear energy operations, aside from reducing the resources needed for long-term storage of the used nuclear fuel.
Used nuclear fuel project by Argonne team
The Argonne project led by Taek K. Kim, a senior nuclear engineer and manager of Nuclear Systems Analysis, has been awarded $7 million.
The project is titled ‘Liquid Lead Suspended Fuel Subcritical Fission Blanket for Nuclear Waste Transmutation.’ It focuses on new type of transmutation process, and uses innovative separation methods — centrifugal force — to remove the waste by-products from the process.
“I am very excited to receive funding from the NEWTON program to advance this brand-new technology. This method uses physics-based separation instead of conventional chemical separations, making it a separation technology that is more secure,” Kim said, according to a press release from Argonne.
The goal of the Kim-led project is to transmute the entire stockpile of minor actinides in the United States within 30 years. Actinides are a group of chemical elements that are noted for their radioactive nature.
The project aims to reduce the nuclear fuel mass by 28 times, which is roughly equivalent “to shrinking a large swimming pool filled with used fuel down to the size of a small hot tub. It will also decrease radiotoxicity management time 333-fold.”
Kim’s project proposes a transmutation system that uses a proton accelerator to start fission in a liquid lead setup containing tiny minor actinide particles — the heavy, radioactive elements near the bottom of the periodic table. As the minor actinide particles fission, the two new, smaller nuclei are ejected from the particle and can be separated from the actinide particles by centrifugal methods in a recycling system.
More about the project and past wins
The transmutation system consists of a proton accelerator, a subcritical fission blanket containing liquid lead, fission product targets, nanometer-size suspended minor actinides transmutation targets, and an innovative separation system based on centrifugal force.
Apart from this, a second project from Argonne – in partnership with DOE’s Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory- has also won a $3.2 million award under the NEWTON program.
Recently, scientists at Argonne had also developed highly advanced “digital twins” for nuclear reactors. The AI-powered digital twin system creates dynamic virtual replicas of physical reactors and promises unprecedented enhancements in operational efficiency, predictive maintenance, and overall safety.
The technology was built upon graph neural networks (GNNs). These networks are uniquely capable of processing complex, interconnected data and mirror the intricate systems within a reactor.