Development of the Method to Assay Barely Measurable Elements in Spent Nuclear Fuel and Application to BWR 9 x 9 Fuel

Kenya Suyama, Gunzo Uchiyama, Hiroyuki Fukaya, Miki Umeda, Toru Yamamoto, and Motomu Suzuki

Abstract In fission products in used nuclear fuel, there are several stable isotopes that have a large neutron absorption effect. For evaluation of the neutronics characteristics of a nuclear reactor, the amount of such isotopes should be evaluated by using burn-up calculation codes. To confirm the correctness of such data obtained by calculation codes, it is important to assure the precision of the evalu­ation of the neutron multiplication factor of used nuclear fuel. However, it is known that there are several hardly measurable elements in such important fission prod­ucts. Data for the amounts of the hardly measurable elements in used nuclear fuel are scarce worldwide.

The Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) had been developing a method to assess the amounts of these fission products that are hardly measurable and have a large neutron capture cross section, under the auspices of the Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organization. In this work, a measurement method was developed combin­ing a simple and effective chemical separation scheme of fission products from used nuclear fuel and an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry with high sensitivity and high precision. This method was applied to the measurement program for the used BWR 9 x 9 fuel assembly. This measurement method is applicable to the required measurements for countermeasures to the accident at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). JAEA has a measurement plan for not only BWR but also PWR fuel.

K. Suyama (*) • G. Uchiyama • H. Fukaya • M. Umeda

Japan Atomic Energy Agency, 2-4 Shirakata-Shirane, Tokai-mura, Ibaraki-ken 319-1195, Japan

e-mail: suyama. kenya@jaea. go. jp T. Yamamoto

Secretariat of Nuclear Regulation Authority, Roppongi-First Bld. 14F, 1-9-9 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-8450, Japan

M. Suzuki

Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, 2-11-1 Iwadokita, Komae-shi, Tokyo 201-8511, Japan

© The Author(s) 2015

K. Nakajima (ed.), Nuclear Back-end and Transmutation Technology for Waste Disposal, DOI 10.1007/978-4-431-55111-9_6

This presentation describes the measurement method developed in the study as well as the future measurement plan in JAEA.

Keywords Fission products • Isotopic composition • Post-irradiation examinations

6.1 Introduction

In fission products in used nuclear fuel, there are several stable isotopes that have a large neutron absorption effect. For evaluation of the neutronics characteristics of a nuclear reactor, the amounts of such isotopes should be evaluated by using burn-up calculation codes. For this purpose, a quantitative analytical method of uranium, plutonium, and fission products of spent fuels has been studied [1,2]. However, it is known that there are several barely measurable elements in such important fission products.

To assay the amount of many fission products, radiation measurement is widely used. Cesium-134 and -137 are typical examples. However, this method is not applicable for isotopes that are important from the aspect of reactivity assessment because they are stable isotopes. For such isotopes, there is the possibility of adopting the isotopic dilution method (IDM), which has been used for measurement of actinides and a few fission products such as neodymium.

In the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA), thermal ionization mass spectrom­etry (TIMS) has been used for IDM to evaluate the burn-up value of the used fuel. TIMS is one of the most reliable instruments to determine the isotopic ratio and the obtained result is considered to be the reference. However, TIMS needs relatively large amounts of the fuel solution sample and a long time is required to obtain the final results after dissolution of the fuel and preparation of the measurement sample.

The most serious problem is that the important fission isotopes for the reactivity assessment belong to the rare earth elements. Because many of these have the same mass number, we need an efficient chemical separation method and high — performance instruments for measuring the isotopic composition that which should have high sensitivity and resolution. For this reason, the fission products important for reactivity assessment are barely measurable and available data for such fission products are scarce.

JAEA has been active in measuring the isotopic composition of the spent nuclear fuel from the 1980s and the obtained data have been archived in the SFCOMPO database [3], which has been supported by the OECD/NEA databank. Based on this past experience, JAEA launched a development program [4] of measurement of the fission products important for reactivity assessment under the auspices of the Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organization (JNES) in 2008 and successfully finalized the program in 2012.

In this program, a combined method of chromatographic separation of uranium, plutonium, and fission products from irradiated nuclear fuels was developed. Furthermore, by the introduction of high-resolution inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (HR-ICP-MS), the IDM has been applied to lanthanide nuclides. The developed method was applied to the measurement of isotopic composition of used BWR 9 x 9 fuel and evaluation of the burn-up calculation code was carried out [5].

After the accidents at Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plants (hereafter referred to as 1F) of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) in 2011, we need a confirmed method to assay the composition of the fuel irradiated in 1F to carry out decommissioning of the Fukushima site. For this purpose, JAEA has a further measurement plan of not only BWR but also PWR used fuel to obtain enough experience to measure the isotopic composition of the irradiated nuclear fuels.

This report summarizes the analytical procedure to measure the amount of fission products isotopes developed in JAEA and the future measurement program.