Survey of Dynamic Simulation Programs for Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing

The absence of any industrial scale nuclear fuel reprocessing in the U.S. has precluded the necessary driver for developing the advanced simulation capability now prevalent in so many other industries. Modeling programs to simulate the dynamic behavior of nuclear fuel separations and processing were originally developed to support the US government’s mission of weapons production and defense fuel recovery. Consequently there has been little effort is the US devoted towards improving this specific process simulation capability during the last two or three decades. More recent work has been focused on elucidating chemical thermodynamics and developing better models of predicting equilibrium in actinide solvent extraction systems. These equilibrium models have been used to augment flowsheet development and testing primarily at laboratory scales. The development of more robust and complete process models has not kept pace with the vast improvements in computational power and user interface and is significantly behind simulation capability in other chemical processing and separation fields