Riley's Research

Hello All!

This is Riley the bad husband who doesn't help his wife with their blog.  I want to address the question that I get asked many times: "So Riley what do you do?" 

Well... I'm glad you asked.  I am a master's student in nuclear engineering at a university in Korea.  For my research project, I am researching how to split nuclear fuel into separate peices that are easier to deal with than nuclear fuel as a whole.

Connecticut Yankee dry storage from 38 years of operation.  If you look closely there are people walking around the containers which provide adequate shielding from the radiation. Website

Nuclear fuel can be though of as having 3 parts:

Natural Uranium 
About 96% of fuel
Extremely low radioactivity
Very very long half life (4 billion years)
Naturally occurring

Plutonium+Minor Actinides
About 1% of fuel
Medium radioactivity
Long Half Life (100,000 years-ish)

Fission Products
About 3 % of fuel  
High radioactivity
Short Half Life (30 years-ish)
This is why nuclear fuel is super dangerous


So if we can divide the fuel into these sections we can do some cool things:

Recycle the uranium, or return it to the environment in its original inert form.
Burn the plutonium and minor actinides in the reactor of your choice
Dispose of the fission products in a small short term facility that is easy to build (think size of school lunch room)

The US already has a technology called PUREX to recycle nuclear fuel, but it is a pain to use, and we choose not to use it for geo-political reasons.  Japan just built a PUREX type plant to do it and it cost $20 billion and the cost is still going up. 


For various geo-political reasons,  South Korea cannot use PUREX.  So if they want to chop up their fuel into the three components, they need another way.  So they are trying to use a method that the Americans are not very serious about that involves melting salt.

Because no large scale facilities have ever operated that use this technology, the system still needs optimized for good operation.  And because we can't just build one to play around with, we need to make computer models to simulate what will happen.  However, the computer models need to be checked, to make sure that they are correct, and that is what I do. 

Over the past few years I have made 2 computer models of my own, and have helped the folks in the US use one of those models.  For my masters research work, I am building a pretend machine to process magnesium (instead of uranium) to test my models.  I think we will begin tests some time in the next two months.  Wish me luck.