抄録
In 2003, the United States Department of Energy (US DOE) launched the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative (AFCI) to address nuclear issues facing the United States. Amongst the major issues as identified by the AFCI were energy and waste management concerns. The interested nuclear wastes, based on their origin and toxicity, are spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and transuranic (TRU) wastes. While SNF wastes are those discharged from a nuclear reactor after being used for at least one cycle or a reactor operation, the TRU wastes are those that contain alpha-bearing radionuclides with atomic numbers greater than uranium. U.S. DOE plans to store its SNF and high-level waste (HLW) in a deep geologic disposal repository located at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. The risks that arise from long-term waste disposal come from approximately 1% of the fuels composition (transuranic group and long-lived isotopes of I and Tc). If transuranic species can be removed from the spent fuel, the toxicity of the waste drops below that of natural U within a period of several hundred years. The mission of the Transmutation Research Program (TRP) at University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) is to establish a nuclear engineering test bed that carries out effective transmutation and advanced reactor research and development effort. Integrated System for Optimized PROcesses (ISOPRO) package, developed from a multi-year project, integrates a chemical separation module, Argonne Model for Universal Solvent Extraction (AMUSE), from the Argonne National Laboratories (ANL) and commercially available system process package, such as ASPEN-Plus. Current research results focus on demonstrating the integration of the chemical separation program and system process package under the ISOPRO interfaces. Microsoft Visual Basic (MS VB) and MS Access database system has been chosen to develop the ISOPRO package. The developed user interface can directly execute and exchange parameters between the ASPEN-plus and AMUSE packages. The major purpose for such implementation is to create system engineering model providing optimization functionality between ASPEN-plus and AMUSE packages. Such integration provide single entry for researchers interested in SFTF process simulation without spending time on complicate data manipulation and various software packages.
