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The nuclear fuel cycle, also called nuclear fuel chain, is the progression of nuclear fuel through a series of differing stages. It consists of steps in the front end, which are the preparation of the fuel, steps in the service period in which the fuel is used during reactor operation, and steps in the back end, which are necessary to safely manage, contain, and either reprocess or dispose of spent nuclear fuel. If spent fuel is not reprocessed, the fuel cycle is referred to as an open fuel cycle ; if the spent fuel is reprocessed, it is referred to as a closed fuel cycle.
Nuclear reprocessing is the chemical separation of fission products and actinides from spent nuclear fuel. Originally, reprocessing was used solely to extract plutonium for producing nuclear weapons. With commercialization of nuclear power, the reprocessed plutonium was recycled back into MOX nuclear fuel for thermal reactors. The reprocessed uranium, also known as the spent fuel material, can in principle also be re-used as fuel, but that is only economical when uranium supply is low and prices are high. Nuclear reprocessing may extend beyond fuel and include the reprocessing of other nuclear reactor material, such as Zircaloy cladding.
Mixed oxide fuel, commonly referred to as MOX fuel, is nuclear fuel that contains more than one oxide of fissile material, usually consisting of plutonium blended with natural uranium, reprocessed uranium, or depleted uranium. MOX fuel is an alternative to the low-enriched uranium fuel used in the light-water reactors that predominate nuclear power generation.
The Savannah River Site (SRS) is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) reservation in the United States, located in the state of South Carolina on land in Aiken, Allendale, and Barnwell counties adjacent to the Savannah River. It lies 25 miles (40 km) southeast of Augusta, Georgia. The site was built during the 1950s to refine nuclear materials for deployment in nuclear weapons. It covers 310 square miles (800 km2) and employs more than 10,000 people.
PUREX is a chemical method used to purify fuel for nuclear reactors or nuclear weapons. PUREX is the de facto standard aqueous nuclear reprocessing method for the recovery of uranium and plutonium from used nuclear fuel. It is based on liquid–liquid extraction ion-exchange.
Plutonium-239 is an isotope of plutonium. Plutonium-239 is the primary fissile isotope used for the production of nuclear weapons, although uranium-235 is also used for that purpose. Plutonium-239 is also one of the three main isotopes demonstrated usable as fuel in thermal spectrum nuclear reactors, along with uranium-235 and uranium-233. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,110 years.
The La Hague site is a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at La Hague on the Cotentin Peninsula in northern France, with the Manche storage centre bordering on it. Operated by Orano, formerly AREVA, and prior to that COGEMA, La Hague has nearly half of the world's light water reactor spent nuclear fuel reprocessing capacity. It has been in operation since 1976, and has a capacity of about 1,700 tonnes per year. It extracts plutonium which is then recycled into MOX fuel at the Marcoule site.
The Megatons to Megawatts Program, also called the United States-Russia Highly Enriched Uranium Purchase Agreement, was an agreement between Russia and the United States whereby Russia converted 500 metric tons of "excess" weapons-grade uranium into 15,000 metric tons of low enriched uranium, which was purchased by the US for use in its commercial nuclear power plants. The official name of the program is the "Agreement between the Government of the Russian Federation and the Government of the United States of America Concerning the Disposition of Highly-Enriched Uranium Extracted from Nuclear Weapons", dated February 18, 1993. Under this Agreement, Russia agreed to supply the United States with low-enriched uranium (LEU) obtained from high-enriched uranium (HEU) found to be in excess of Russian defense purposes. The United States agreed to purchase the low-enriched uranium fuel.
Spent nuclear fuel, occasionally called used nuclear fuel, is nuclear fuel that has been irradiated in a nuclear reactor. It is no longer useful in sustaining a nuclear reaction in an ordinary thermal reactor and, depending on its point along the nuclear fuel cycle, it will have different isotopic constituents than when it started.
Weapons-grade nuclear material is any fissionable nuclear material that is pure enough to make a nuclear weapon or has properties that make it particularly suitable for nuclear weapons use. Plutonium and uranium in grades normally used in nuclear weapons are the most common examples.
Plutonium is a chemical element; it has symbol Pu and atomic number 94. It is an actinide metal of silvery-gray appearance that tarnishes when exposed to air, and forms a dull coating when oxidized. The element normally exhibits six allotropes and four oxidation states. It reacts with carbon, halogens, nitrogen, silicon, and hydrogen. When exposed to moist air, it forms oxides and hydrides that can expand the sample up to 70% in volume, which in turn flake off as a powder that is pyrophoric. It is radioactive and can accumulate in bones, which makes the handling of plutonium dangerous.
Reactor-grade plutonium (RGPu) is the isotopic grade of plutonium that is found in spent nuclear fuel after the uranium-235 primary fuel that a nuclear power reactor uses has burnt up. The uranium-238 from which most of the plutonium isotopes derive by neutron capture is found along with the U-235 in the low enriched uranium fuel of civilian reactors.
The Rokkasho Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Facility is a nuclear reprocessing plant with an annual capacity of 800 tons of uranium or 8 tons of plutonium. It is owned by Japan Nuclear Fuel Limited (JNFL) and is part of the Rokkasho complex located in the village of Rokkasho in northeast Aomori Prefecture, on the Pacific coast of the northernmost part of Japan's main island of Honshu.
Nuclear Fuel Services Inc. (NFS) is an American company that has been a major supplier of fuel for the United States Navy's fleet of nuclear-powered vessels since the 1960s. In recent years it has also reprocessed weapons-grade uranium into nuclear reactor fuel. It operates a 65-acre (260,000 m2) gated complex in Erwin, Tennessee. NFS is a subsidiary of BWX Technologies, Inc.
The Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP), also known as 'Z Plant', was part of the Hanford Site nuclear research complex in Washington, US.
Reprocessed uranium (RepU) is the uranium recovered from nuclear reprocessing, as done commercially in France, the UK and Japan and by nuclear weapons states' military plutonium production programs. This uranium makes up the bulk of the material separated during reprocessing.
The Catawba Nuclear Station is a nuclear power plant located on a 391-acre (158 ha) peninsula, called "Concord Peninsula", that reaches out into Lake Wylie, in York, South Carolina, US. Catawba utilizes a pair of Westinghouse four-loop pressurized water reactors.
The BN-800 reactor is a sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor, built at the Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Station, in Zarechny, Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia. The reactor is designed to generate 880 MW of electrical power. The plant was considered part of the weapons-grade Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement signed between the United States and Russia, with the reactor being part of the final step for a plutonium-burner core The plant reached its full power production in August 2016. According to Russian business journal Kommersant, the BN-800 project cost 140.6 billion rubles.
The Mining and Chemical Combine was established in 1950 to produce plutonium for weapons. It is in the closed city Zheleznogorsk, Krasnoyarsk Krai. The company is currently part of the Rosatom group.
Remix Fuel was developed in Russia to make use of Mixed Recycled Uranium and Plutonium from spent nuclear fuel to manufacture fresh fuel suitable for widespread use in Russian reactor designs.
References
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Pavel Podvig: Can the US-Russia plutonium disposition agreement be saved? Archived 2016-10-26 at the Wayback Machine Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 28. April 2016.
- ↑ "Plutonium – wohin damit?" (PDF) (in German). Labor Spiez. August 2002. Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 October 2016.
- ↑ "National Nuclear Security Administration – The MOX Project". Areva. Retrieved 6 July 2017.
- 1 2 "Obama seeks to terminate MOX project at Savannah River". World Nuclear News. 10 February 2016. Retrieved 6 July 2017.
- ↑ Указ Президента Российской Федерации от 03.10.2016 № 511 (in Russian).