Contract Awarded to Study Recycling of Nuclear Waste

From an AREVA press release:

The International Nuclear Recycling Alliance (INRA) – led by AREVA (Paris, EPA:CEI) and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. and including Japan Nuclear Fuel Limited; Washington Group International; BWX Technologies, Inc.; and Battelle -- has been awarded a contract with the Department of Energy (DOE) to evaluate closing the nuclear fuel cycle in the U.S., through the development of a nuclear fuel recycling center and an advanced recycling reactor. The contract was awarded within the framework of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP).

GNEP seeks to close the nuclear fuel cycle by recycling used fuel in ways that both minimize proliferation risks and reduce the volume and toxicity of final waste residues. Closing the fuel cycle would conserve uranium resources and enhance energy security.

Under the terms of the contract, INRA will provide three major studies:

• Technology development roadmaps analyzing the technology needed to achieve GNEP goals;
• Business plans showing methods for the development and commercialization of advanced GNEP technologies and facilities;
• Conceptual design studies for the nuclear fuel recycling center and the advanced recycling reactor.

The nuclear fuel recycling center would have two functions: the treatment of used fuel to separate it into recyclable, energy-producing components and final waste materials, and the manufacture of nuclear fuel from the recyclable components of the used fuel. The advanced recycling reactor will be fueled with materials recovered from used reactor fuel. The reactor will transform some of these radioactive materials into a more easily manageable waste form while producing energy.

In my mind it is inevitable that nuclear power will play an ever increasing role in meeting our electrical energy needs. As indicated in a previous post, NRG is leading the way with the first application to build a plant in 30 years, with a construction time almost as short as for a clean coal plant. Recycling of nuclear waste, rather than storage which is the current proposal seems to offer the advantage of recycling the waste as well as being a safer method that minimizes the risk of proliferation. Yucca mountain seems to be locked up in endless battles for approval, not that any method will not have its difficulties. No method will meet the approval of everyone, but we must have a viable method for treating our nuclear waste and recycling is my choice.

Comments

[GreyFlcn]

It's not ****ing recycling.
It's reprocessing.

The difference being that it results in the same ammount of high level waste.

Just less low level waste.

HOWEVER only the high level waste is "hot" and important when considering waste storage

Since long term storage of nuclear waste is limited by temperature, NOT volume.

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/4891

________

In other news, looks like Yucca Mountain may not ever happen.

http://www.grist.org/news/2007/09/25/yucca/

[Paul Dietz]

If long term storage of nuclear waste is limited by temperature, the obvious solution is to NOT BURY THE STUFF. Rock acts as an insulating blanket. Put the waste in armored casks that can rest safely at or near the surface, dissipating the decay heat to environment where it can be quickly radiated to space.

[averagejoe]

What about using Accelerator-driven Sub-critical reactors to transmute waste into materials with shorter half lives? As a side benefit, this type of reactor could also use relatively abundant materials like U-238 or Thorium as fuel.

[bigTom]

Most of the long lived waste products are fissionable material, the fissions products mostly don't have such long lifetimes, so if this sort of a fuel cycle were used, the amount of highlevel waste per unit of energy output would be lowered dratically.

[SGD]

The issue isn't about the technical feasibility of recycling spent fuel, breeding fertile U-238 or Th-232 into fissile fuel, or transmuting the long lived highly radioactive trans-uranics left after reprocessing the spent fuel.

The primary issue is that all of these activities can generate large amounts of easily divertible plutonium (or in the case of thorium, U-233) for manufacturing nuclear weapons and is politically undesirable from a proliferation stand point. GNEP is an attempt to put together a regulatory framework and put the technologies in place for these activities to minimize the proliferation risk.

A closed fuel cycle has the potential to significantly increase the amount of available nuclear fuel by recycling and burning what would be stored in long term repositories, such as Yucca Mountain, and creating large amounts of new fuel from fertile materials. What becomes waste in a closed loop fuel cycle would be further down the period table and much shorter lived, on the order of 100’s of years vs 1,000’s. This greatly reduces the engineering controls to store it safely and results in a much smaller amount of waste.

GNEP is also an attempt to deal with the reality that there isn’t much high grade uranium ore where it is feasible to enrich the U-235 for use in a once through cycle and waste all of that fertile U-238. I understand that with the current installed base of nuclear power, and the planned build rate for new plants world-wide, that a once through fuel cycle will only last, at best, 50-100 years.

[averagejoe]

SGD, unless I'm greatly mistaken, accelerator driven subcritical reactors can take care of all the problems you mentioned.

[Kit P]

This is an economic issue. The cost for reprocessing is trending down. Vitrified waste requires less packaging material and holds the fission products in a more stable form so they do not leak into the groundwater before decaying.

[Paul Dietz]

The cost of reprocessing still exceeds the benefit (vs. just storing spent fuel in casks at the surface). Accelerator-driven reactors are technically interesting, but economically dubious as well.

I still put my bet on seawater uranium extraction making them both non-starters for generations to come.

[averagejoe]

I found an interesting webpage that deals with the use of adsorbant materials to harvest uranium from seawater. It provides data regarding costs and quantities, if anyone is interested.

http://npc.sarov.ru/english/digest/132004/appendix8.html

[Kirk Sorensen]

One of the reasons that I am so interested in thorium-fueled fluoride reactors is that it can make reprocessing much simpler than the current approach used with solid uranium-oxide fuel today. Properly done, reprocessing fluoride fuel can be so simple that it can be co-located with the plant and run in a continuous mode.