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The U.S. is moving from a once through
fuel cycle to a new approach
that includes recycling of spent
nuclear fuel without separating out pure
plutonium. This capability would employ
advanced technologies to increase
proliferation resistance, recover and reuse
fuel
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High purity uranium oxide product recovered from used nuclear fuel using the UREX+ process |
resources, and reduce the amount of
wastes requiring permanent geological
disposal at Yucca Mountain. This work
builds on the Department of Energy’s
Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative, which has
been researching innovative recycle
concepts since 2000.
Used nuclear fuel contains uranium,
transuranic elements (plutonium and other
long-lived radioactive material) and fission
products. The fission products are waste and
make up less than 5 percent of the used fuel.
The buildup of the fission products inhibits
the nuclear fission reaction, so used fuel must
be removed from a nuclear power plant.
Under the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), recycling would
comprise uranium extraction plus (UREX+)
that would accomplish the following:
- Separate uranium from the spent fuel at a
very high level of purification that would
allow it to be recycled for re-enrichment, stored in an unshielded facility or simply
buried as a low-level waste.
- Separate and immobilize long-lived
fission products, technetium and iodine,
for disposal in Yucca Mountain.
- Extract short-lived fission products,
cesium and strontium, and prepare
them for decay storage until they meet the requirements for disposal as low-level waste.
- Separate transuranic elements
(plutonium, neptunium, americium and
curium) from the remaining fission
products so they could be fabricated into
fuel for an Advanced Burner Reactor, a
fast reactor.
To consume, or destroy, transuranic
elements while recovering their energy
content, they must be separated from the
uranium and fission products and then be
fabricated into new fuel. Fast reactors
would consume these transuranics,
eliminating the need for their disposal in
Yucca Mountain. This approach would potentially increase the effective capacity
of the geologic repository by an estimated
factor of 50 to 100.
Partnering With Industry
The Department of Energy is
investigating the interest and ability of
industry to deploy an integrated
recycling capability consisting of two
facilities:
- A Consolidated Fuel Treatment Center,
capable of separating the usable
components contained in light water
spent fuel from the waste products.
- An advanced fast reactor, capable of
consuming those usable products from the
spent fuel while generating electricity.
U.S. national laboratories would design and
direct a third component, the Advanced Fuel
Cycle Facility, a modern state-of-the-art
laboratory designed to serve fuels research
needs for the next 50 years. It would use
modular, flexible construction techniques
with near-term priority given to the
fabrication and qualification of fuels for an
advanced fast reactor.
The U.S. will explore collaboration with
fuel supplier nations on the development of
these technologies.
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