Ultrasonic Fuel Cleaning

The above e-mail was sent to me by Region 4, NRC, in partial response to my inquiry about the application of ultrasonic fuel cleaning at River Bend Station (RBS). See my entry of January 22 for a view of fouled fuel at RBS. Apparently, ultrasonic fuel cleaning has never been applied at RBS, although it has been applied at several other nuclear power plants.

It is interesting that this complex physical chemical process was reduced to practice and applied at several nuclear power plants without any review or authorization by our NRC. There has been no licensing action and there is therefore no documentation of licensing in the NRC's Public Document Room.

I'll have further entries on this matter. In the meantime, eager readers may get interesting background at the NRC website via an ADAMS search at "ML032810635"