Nuclear Recycle Group

A b s t r a c t PHWR fuel bundles are required to be dismantled for inspection the individual pins under highly radioactive environment of the hot cell. PHWR fuel bundle consists of 19 tubular pins, spot-welded to two end plates (tie plates) on each side. It is of about 14.5mm diameter and 495mm long. It is proposed to carry out the disassembly operation by laser cutting of both the tie plates. Accordingly the experiments were conducted at LPAW Section, BARC to study the feasibility of the scheme, which gave the encouraging results. A dummy end plate was successfully cut to separate spot weld location using laser on a 3-Axis CNC workstation. Based on the feasibility studies, a design for totally automatic and remotely operable system has been made and is proposed to be used for dismantling of PHWR fuels inside the hot cell. The system has to perform operations like moving the bundle to laser cell from charging cask, cutting both the end plates using laser to separate out 19 pins for examinations and finally chopping of each pin for dissolution of the fuel for further processing