RISK AND SAFETY MANAGEMENT

Risk and Safety Management

Risk and Safety Management

Introduction

The SFR is designed for management of high-level wastes and, in particular, management of plutonium and other actinides. Important safety features of the system include a long thermal response time, a large margin to coolant boiling, a primary system that operates near atmospheric pressure, and intermediate sodium system between the radioactive sodium in the primary system and the power conversion system. (Puybaraud 2007 643-54) Water/steam and carbon-dioxide are being considered as the working fluids for the power conversion system in order to achieve high-level performances in thermal efficiency, safety and reliability. With innovations to reduce capital cost, the SFR can serve markets for electricity.

The fuel cycle employs a full actinide recycle with three major options. The first option is a large size (600 to 1,500 MWe) loop-type sodium-cooled reactor using mixed uranium-plutonium oxide fuel, supported by a fuel cycle based upon advanced aqueous processing at a central location serving a number of reactors. (Osama and Sadi 2008 15-24)The second option is an intermediate size (300 to 600 MWe) pool-type reactor and the third a small size (50 to 150MWe) modular-type sodium-cooled reactor employing uranium-plutonium-minor-actinide-zirconium metal alloy fuel, supported by a fuel cycle based on pyrometallurgical processing in facilities integrated with the reactor. (Hinks and Puybaraud 2008 377-391) The outlet temperature is approximately 550 degrees celsius for all the three concepts.

Risk Assessment Table

Map

Uranium is found all over the world but only a few countries have it in enough quantities to make it worthwhile mining it. It bares no relation to the location of fossil fuels and is quite widespread.

For those worried about the hostile or potentially hostile suppliers of our fossil fuels, it is interesting to see the map above and think about energy security for uranium. With governments all over the world considering turning to nuclear power to back up their failing oil and gas, how certain can any country not possessing uranium be about the supply?

Register

While uranium oxide product from a mine is certainly radioactive, the long half-lives involved mean that it is practically impossible to receive a harmful radiation dose from it. Cameco points out that for a person standing one metre from a 200-litre drum of product they would need to be there about one thousand hours to register a dose of 1 mSv. Uranium ore and mine tailings are more radioactive, depending on the grade of the orebody, but usually not to such a degree that access needs to be restricted.

Regulatory Requirement

The Government considers that the unnecessary introduction of radioactivity into the environment is undesirable, even at levels where the doses to both human and non-human species are low and, on the basis of current knowledge, are unlikely to cause harm.

When the current era of uranium mining began in Australia in the 1970s, a review of the regulatory framework for radiation safety was undertaken. This resulted in the production of the 1975 Commonwealth Code of Practice on Radiation Protection in the Mining and ...