Candidacy Renewal Report for ICERR Designation

The Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) has revitalized interest in adapting nuclear energy for power and propulsion. Prior to the selection of a nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) system, extensive testing of the various proposed concepts will be required. In today’s environmental, safety and health culture, full size rocket engine tests as were done under the Rover/NERVA program will be extremely difficult and expensive to perform and meet NASA’s schedules. A different test strategy uses a hydrogen loop in an existing reactor to test a wide variety of single elements or clusters of elements for fuel qualification. This approach is expected to reduce operating and capital costs and expedite the testing schedule. This paper examines the potential of performing subscale tests in a hydrogen loop in an existing reactor such as the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory or the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The HFIR is expected to achieve power densities comparable to those achieved in ATR because of the 85 MWt power level and the high thermal and fast flux levels. The available length and diameter of the test region of FHIR are 60 cm and 10 cm whereas the available length and diameter of the test region of ATR are 120 cm and 12 cm respectively.

The Advanced Test Reactor (ATR), located in the ATR Complex of the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), was constructed in the 1960s for the purpose of irradiating reactor fuels and materials. Other irradiation services, such as radioisotope production, are also performed at ATR. The ATR is fueled with high-enriched uranium (HEU) matrix (UAlx) in an aluminum sandwich plate cladding. The National Nuclear Security Administration Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI) strategic mission includes efforts to reduce and protect vulnerable nuclear and radiological material at civilian sites around the world. Converting research reactors from using HEU to low-enriched uranium (LEU) was originally started in 1978 as the Reduced Enrichment for Research and Test Reactors (RERTR) Program under the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science. Within this strategic mission, GTRI has three goals that provide a comprehensive approach to achieving this mission: The first goal, the driver for the modification that is the subject of this determination, is to convert research reactors from using HEU to LEU. Thus the mission of the ATR LEU Fuel Conversion Project is to convert the ATR and Advanced Test Reactor Critical facility (ATRC) (two of the six U.S. High-Performance Research Reactors [HPRR]) to LEU fuel by 2017. The major modification criteria evaluation of the project pre-conceptual design identified several issues that lead to the conclusion that the project is a major modification.

The Transient Reactor Test (TREAT) facility, located on the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), northwest of the Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC), has been in programmatic shutdown for more than twenty-three years. Construction of TREAT by the Teller Construction Co., Portland, Oregon, was started in February, 1958, and completed in early November, 1958. The reactor first achieved criticality on February 23, 1959. Operations continued until April 28, 1994, when the reactor was shut down due to the lack of a programmatic mission. Recently, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) identified a need to resume transient testing of new reactor fuels. The Resumption of Transient Testing Program (RTTP) has readied the TREAT facility to resume transient testing operations. The first reactor criticality since the shut down in 1994 was achieved on November 14, 2017. This report details the radiological measurements taken in the TREAT Reactor Building and the surrounding environment prior to and just after its restart in order to characterize the radiological conditions that existed prior to and during the initial restart operations. The authors would like to acknowledge the support from RTTP Management and the TREAT Operations staff for allowing the extensive radiological surveys, as well as the health physics technicians from the INL Radiological Control organization who performed many of the measurements referenced in this report.

Post-irradiation examination (PIE) is being performed in support of tristructural isotropic (TRISO) coated particle fuel development and qualification for High-Temperature Gas-cooled Reactors (HTGRs). AGR-1 was the first in a series of TRISO fuel irradiation experiments initiated in 2006 under the Advanced Gas Reactor (AGR) Fuel Development and Qualification Program; this work continues to be funded by the Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy as part of the Advanced Reactor Technologies (ART) initiative. AGR-1 fuel compacts were fabricated at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in 2006 and irradiated for three years in the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) to demonstrate and evaluate fuel performance under HTGR irradiation conditions. PIE is being performed at INL and ORNL to study how the fuel behaved during irradiation, and to examine fuel performance during exposure to elevated temperatures at or above temperatures that could occur during a depressurized conduction cooldown event. This report summarizes safety testing of irradiated AGR-1 Compact 5-1-1 in the ORNL Core Conduction Cooldown Test Facility (CCCTF) and post-safety testing PIE.

This report documents calculations performed to predict failure probability of TRISO-coated fuel particles and diffusion of fission products through these particles during safety tests following the second irradiation test of the Advanced Gas Reactor program (AGR-2). The calculations include the modeling of the AGR-2 irradiation that occurred from June 2010 to October 2013 in the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) and the modeling of a safety testing phase to support safety tests planned at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) for a selection of AGR-2 compacts. The heat-up of AGR-2 compacts is a critical component of the AGR-2 fuel performance evaluation, and its objectives are to identify the effect of accident test temperature, burnup, and irradiation temperature on the performance of the fuel at elevated temperature. Safety testing of compacts will be followed by detailed examinations of the fuel particles to further evaluate fission product retention and behavior of the kernel and coatings. The modeling was performed using the particle fuel model computer code PARFUME developed at INL. PARFUME is an advanced gas-cooled reactor fuel performance modeling and analysis code (Miller 2009). It has been developed as an integrated mechanistic code that evaluates the thermal, mechanical, and physico-chemical behavior of fuel particles during irradiation to determine the failure probability of a population of fuel particles given the particle-to-particle statistical variations in physical dimensions and material properties that arise from the fuel fabrication process, accounting for all viable mechanisms that can lead to particle failure. The code also determines the diffusion of fission products from the fuel through the particle coating layers, and through the fuel matrix to the coolant boundary. The subsequent release of fission products is calculated at the compact level (release of fission products from the compact). PARFUME calculates the release fraction as the ratio of the number of atoms released from the compact to the amount produced in the compact fuel kernels and through uranium contamination. These safety test predictions aim at giving guidance for the upcoming safety tests to be conducted at ORNL and INL. The AGR-2 compacts modeled in this study belong to the four U.S. capsules of the AGR-2 irradiation test train. For each capsule, the compacts with the lowest and highest burnups were selected to provide a prediction envelope. The objective of this document is to present results of calculations and analyses made by PARFUME on these selected AGR-2 compacts. These results include: • Fuel failure probability • Palladium penetration • Fractional release of fission products Details associated with completion of these calculations are provided in the remainder of this document: the AGR-2 Safety Testing plan is briefly introduced in Section 2, PARFUME modeling is outlined in Section 3, results are described in Section 4, conclusions are given in Section 5, and references are listed in Section 6.

The Department of Energy (DOE) has large quantities of sodium-nitrate based liquid wastes. Around 1 billion liters of high level waste tank supernatant are present at Hanford, Savannah River Plant, Rocky Flats Plant, Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The largest quantity of these wastes is in the 149 single shell tanks at Hanford which hold up to 1 million gallons each. These tank waste are typically 4 to 5 molar in nitrate and contain radionuclides, various salts, and heavy metals. INEL high-level waste tank supernatant contains about 0.7 and 0.6 grams per liter of chromium and mercury, respectively. SRP high-level waste tank supernatant contains about 0.2 g/L of chromium. Other heavy metals could well be present at lower levels in theses tank wastes. The major components present in these wastes are summarized in Appendix A. These wastes are currently regulated and managed by the DOE. Under the Federal Facility Compliance Act (FFCA) DOE is subject to RCRA, which would apply to these tank supernatants. Stabilization of this waste is difficult because nitrates are very mobile. Additionally, vitrification of these wastes produces large quantities of hard-to-manage NO{sub x} emissions. The conversion of sodium nitrate to ammonia is discussed.

Steady state flow channel blockage tests were conducted at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) as part of the safety basis upgrade program for the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR). The tests were sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). This study was aimed at carrying out flow blockage tests, establishing a base case to compare test results with numerical results using a computational fluid dynamics code, calculating temperature profiles for blockage cases, and determining whether or not the ATR core would be exposed to core melting due to blockage of the inlet of a fuel cooling channel. The test section consisted of three parallel channels and two side channels along the side plate. Three cases were selected to evaluate flow blockage events in the channels. A base case with all the channels open, Case 1 where the inlet of the middle channel is blocked, and Case 2 where both the middle channel and the side channel are blocked. Laser Doppler anemometer (LDA) was used to measure velocities in the channel. Velocities were measured at 2.54-mm intervals in the channel width, and every 1.27-mm around side windows in the flow direction for three parallel channels. LDA measured velocity profiles for the base case and Case 1 indicated good agreement with predicted velocity profiles from the CFD model. The channel velocity in the blocked channel is about 70% of the velocity in the unblocked, adjacent channel in between the top and second side channel vents. Additional flow redistribution occurs into the blocked channel at the second side channel vent. Temperature calculations for the base case were made to compare with benchmark temperatures calculated with the ATR SINDA model and CFD calculations underpredicted benchmark plate temperatures by less than 10% while it predicted bulk temperatures very well. The same heat flux and boundary conditions were incorporated for Case 1 and Case 2. The results for both cases indicated that core melt would not occur in the postulated ATR flow channel blockage events simulated for this study. Peak fuel plate temperature is about 20% greater than the peak temperature for the unblocked case just upstream of the second side channel vent.

A greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory is a systematic approach to account for the production and release of certain gases generated by an institution from various emission sources. The gases of interest are those that climate science has identified as related to anthropogenic global climate change. This document presents an inventory of GHGs generated during Fiscal Year (FY) 2015 by Idaho National Laboratory (INL), a Department of Energy (DOE) sponsored entity, located in southeastern Idaho. In recent years, concern has grown about the environmental impact of GHGs. This, together with a desire to decrease harmful environmental impacts, would be enough to encourage the calculation of an inventory of the total GHGs generated at INL. Additionally, INL has a desire to see how its emissions compare with similar institutions, including other DOE national laboratories. Executive Order 13693 requires that federal agencies and institutions document reductions in GHG emissions. INL’s GHG inventory was calculated according to methodologies identified in federal GHG guidance documents using operational control boundaries. It measures emissions generated in three scopes: (1) INL emissions produced directly by stationary or mobile combustion and by fugitive emissions, (2) the share of emissions generated by entities from which INL purchased electrical power, and (3) indirect or shared emissions generated by outsourced activities that benefit INL (occur outside INL’s organizational boundaries, but are a consequence of INL’s activities). This inventory found that INL generated 58,330 metric tons (MT) of CO2 equivalent (CO2e ) emissions during FY15. The following conclusions were made from looking at the results of the individual contributors to INL’s FY15 GHG inventory: • Electricity (including the associated transmission and distribution losses) is the largest contributor to INL’s GHG inventory, with over 50% of the CO2e emissions • Other sources with high emissions were employee commuting, mobile combustion (fleet fuels), stationary combustion (facility fuels), business air travel, and waste disposal (including fugitive emissions from the onsite landfill and contracted disposal) • Sources with low emissions were wastewater treatment (onsite and contracted), business ground travel (in personal and rental vehicles), and fugitive emissions from refrigerants. This report details the methods behind quantifying INL’s GHG inventory and discusses lessons learned on better practices by which information important to tracking GHGs can be tracked and recorded. It is important to note that because this report differentiates between those portions of INL that are managed and operated by Battelle Energy Alliance (BEA) and those managed by other contractors, it includes only the Laboratory activities overseen by BEA. It is assumed that other contractors will provide similar reporting for those activities they manage, where appropriate.

Validation of the Griffin application for TREAT transient modeling and simulation

The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) has a large inventory of diverse types of spent nuclear fuel (SNF). This legacy derives from the history of the INL as the National Reactor Testing Station, and from its mission to recover HEU from SNF and to test and examine SNF after irradiation. The INL also has a large diversity of SNF storage facilities, some 50 years old. SNF at INL has many forms—from intact assemblies down to metallurgical mounts, and some fuel has been wet stored for over 40 years. SNF is stored bare or in metal cans under water, or dry in vaults, caissons or casks. Inspection shows varying corrosion and degradation of the SNF and its storage cans. SNF has been stored in 10 different facilities: 5 pools, one cask storage pad, one vault, two generations of caisson facilities, and one modular Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation (ISFSI). The pools range in age from 40 years old to the most modern in the US Department of Energy (DOE) complex. The near-term objective is to move SNF from older pools to interim dry storage, allowing shutdown and decommissioning of the older facilities. This move involves drying methods that are dependent on fuel type. The long-term objective is to have INL SNF in safe dry storage and ready to be shipped to the National Repository. The unique features of the INL SNF requires special treatments and packaging to meet the proposed repository acceptance criteria and SNF will be repackaged in standardized canisters for shipment and disposal in the National Repository. Disposal will use the standardized canisters that can be co-disposed with High Level Waste glass logs to limit the total fissile material in a repository waste package. The DOE standardized canister also simplifies the repository handling of the multitude of DOE SNF sizes and shapes.

Engineering design studies of the feasibility of conversion of the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) from high-enriched uranium (HEU) to low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel are ongoing at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) as part of an effort sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI)/Reduced Enrichment for Research and Test Reactors (RERTR) program. The fuel type selected by the program for the conversion of the five high-power research reactors in the U.S. that still use HEU fuel is a new U-Mo monolithic fuel. Studies by ORNL have previously indicated that HFIR can be successfully converted using the new fuel provided (1) the reactor power can be increased from 85 MW to 100 MW and (2) the fuel can be fabricated to a specific reference design. Fabrication techniques for the new fuel are under development by the program but are still immature, especially for the “complex” aspects of the HFIR fuel design. In FY 2012, the program underwent a major shift in focus to emphasize developing and qualifying processes for the fabrication of reliable and affordable LEU fuel. In support of this new focus and in an effort to ensure that the HFIR fuel design is as suitable for reliable fabrication as possible, ORNL undertook the present study to propose and evaluate several alternative design features. These features include (1) eliminating the fuel zone axial contouring in the previous reference design by substituting a permanent neutron absorber in the lower unfueled region of all of the fuel plates, (2) relocating the burnable neutron absorber from the fuel plates of the inner fuel element to the side plates of the inner fuel element (the fuel plates of the outer fuel element do not contain a burnable absorber), (3) relocating the fuel zone inside the fuel plate to be centered on the centerline of the depth of the plate, and (4) reshaping the radial contour of the relocated fuel zone to be symmetric about this centerline. The present studies used current analytical tools to evaluate the various alternate designs for cycle length, scientific performance (e.g., neutron scattering), and steady-state and transient thermal performance using both safety limit and nominal parameter assumptions. The studies concluded that a new reference design combining a permanent absorber in the lower unfueled region of all of the fuel plates, a burnable absorber in the inner element side plates, and a relocated and reshaped (but still radially contoured) fuel zone will allow successful conversion of HFIR. Future collaboration with the program will reveal whether the new reference design can be fabricated reliably and affordably. Following this feedback, additional studies using state-of-the-art developmental analytical tools are proposed to optimize the design of the fuel zone radial contour and the amount and location of both types of neutron absorbers to further flatten thermal peaks while maximizing the performance of the reactor.

The Transient Reactor Test Facility (TREAT) at Idaho National Laboratory is an air-cooled, thermal, heterogeneous facility used to test reactor materials in simulated accident conditions by inducing fission heating with intense neutron pulses. TREAT operated from 1959 until 1994 with the primary goal of testing fast reactor fuels and was brought back online in 2017 to re-establish DOE's nuclear fuels transient testing capabilities. Beginning in the late 1970s, Idaho National Laboratory worked in conjunction with other organizations to increase TREAT's capability for in-pile testing. While these upgrades had not been implemented by the time the reactor was put into standby mode, new assemblies and graphite-urania fuel blocks with increased uranium concentrations had already been designed and fabricated. This project, as part of Idaho National Laboratory's Department of Reactor Physics, modeled the TREAT Upgrade (TU) fuel assemblies in MCNP and implemented them in an existing TREAT model. Calculations were performed using INL's high performance computer to find a critical combination of TU and standard fuel and this geometry's excess reactivity. Future work will include calculating a power coupling factor in the experiment, determining power peaking factors throughout the core, and assessing how much reactivity would be added by replacing the Inconel-625 cladding with silicon carbide.

The Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program under the US Department of Energy (DOE) consists of three product lines. The Fuels Product Line (FPL), hosted at Idaho National Laboratory (INL), has produced a multiphysics framework with the name Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) (Gaston et al. 2015). The FPL has also produced several high-fidelity physics codes including the fuel performance code Bison (Hales et al. 2016). The Reactors Product Line (RPL), hosted at Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne), has developed the high-order spectral-element Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code Nek5000 (Fischer et al. 2015). The Integration Product Line (IPL), hosted at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), is tasked with ensuring tools from the other product lines can be coupled together so that users may perform high-fidelity multiphysics simulations.

The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy (NE) released a request for information (RFI) (DE-SOL-0008246) for “University, National Laboratory, Industry and International Input to the Office of Nuclear Energy’s Competitive Research and Development Work Scope Development” on April 13, 2015. DOE-NE solicited information for work scopes for the four main program areas as well as any others suggested by the community. The RFI proposal period closed on June 19, 2015. From the 124 responses, 238 individual work scopes were extracted. Thirty-three were associated with a DOE national laboratory, including Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Thirty US universities submitted proposals as well as ten industrial/commercial institutions. Four major R&D areas emerged from the submissions, appearing in more than 15% of the proposed work scopes. These were: nuclear fuel studies, safety and risk analysis, nuclear systems analysis and design and advanced instrumentation and controls. Structural materials for nuclear power plants, used nuclear fuel disposition and various types of systems analysis were also popular, each appearing in more than 10% of the proposals. Nuclear Energy Enabling Technologies (NEET) was the most popular program area with 42% of the proposals referencing the NEET-CTD program. The order of the remaining programs was Fuel Cycle Technologies (FC) at 34%, Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) at 29% and Reactor Concepts at 17%.

Under Section 61.94 of Title 40, Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Part 61, Subpart H, ''National Emission Standards for Emission of Radionuclides Other Than Radon From Department of Energy Facilities,'' each Department of Energy (DOE) facility must submit an annual report documenting compliance. This report addresses the Section 61.94 reporting requirements for operations at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) for calendar year (CY) 1998. The Idaho Operations Office of the DOE is the primary contract concerning compliance with the National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAPs) at the INEEL. For CY 1998, airborne radionuclide emissions from the INEEL operations were calculated to result in a maximum individual dose to a member of the public of 7.92E-03 mrem (7.92E-08 Sievert). This effective dose equivalent (EDE) is well below the 40 CFR 61, Subpart H, regulatory standard of 10 mrem per year (1.0E-04 Sievert per year).