Fuel Cycle

As you will see by reading this page there are enormous economical benefits to being able to reprocess and recycle nuclear fuel coming out of the current commercial nuclear reactors in this country. But due to Jimmy Carters edict, nuclear fuel in this country cannot be reprocessed. He is afraid that if we reprocess fuel some of the fissile material will be stolen by rouge countries and made into bombs.

Inside a bland industrial building in Wilmington, N.C., an experiment is in the works that could vastly reduce the cost, time, and space needed to make fuel for nuclear power plants.

In that building, secret uranium-enrichment technology licensed by GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy is nearing a pilot test. If successful, the new technology will enable the company to supply low-cost nuclear fuel to power reactors worldwide, officials say.

Only broad outlines of the “Separation of Isotopes by Laser EXcitation,” or SILEX technology, are public. Most details are classified under the Atomic Energy Act.

Uranium is mined, refined, and converted to yellowcake. Natural uranium out of the ground contains isotopes in the mass proportions 99.3% Uranuium-238 and 0.7% uranium-235. Since only uranium-235 will fission and produce heat in a nuclear reactor, the mass of uranium-235 must be increased to about 3.0% or 4.0% to be suitable for present day light water reactors (LWR). Natural uranium with only 0.7% fissile U235 will not keep the chain reaction going. A gaseous centrifugal process enriches the natural uranium.

As an interesting sideline, there is a controversy about Iraq enriching uranium to a sufficient enrichment to make atomic bombs. Aluminum tubes were found in Iraq. Did Iraq have the process to enriched uranium for an atomic bomb? It is an open question. Aluminum tubes are used in the centrifuge enrichment process.

From the enriched uranium material the reactor manufacturers chemically combine the uranium into pellets of uranium oxide. The pellets are then stacked into long tubes. These tubes are arranged in individual square shaped housings called a fuel bundle. A reactor core is made up if many individual fuel bundles.

The fuel bundles stay in the reactor core for about 4 to 6 years and then some need to be replaced due to fuel burn-up and/or fuel damage due to the intense radiation. This is called the once-through cycle because the fuel bundles once out of the reactor are never opened to retrieve the remaining uranium-235, which is still a good fissionable fuel. The fuel bundles still contain 95% to 99% of unused uranium that could be reprocessed, put into new fuel bundles, and recycled into the reactor.

The fuel bundles coming out of the reactor are stored in a pool of water at each reactor site. It is intended to transport the bundles to the storage facility call YUCCA Mountain in Nevada when it becomes ready to receive the fuel. The fuel is considered to be spent or termed depleted uranium (DU ) because current law in the US does not permit the fuel bundles to be reprocessed to retrieve the good fuel remaining. Preprocessing is being done in other some other countries. Moreover, the volume of waste that is not really waste will fill up YUCCA Mountain whereas the volume of real waste would not even start to fill up YUCCA Mountain.

The fuel bundles are not stored in a pool of water, but are reprocessed and the uranium and plutonium are put back into the new fuel bundles.

After reprocessing the fission product wastes are vitrified in glass and stored. The volume of waste is very small and not as radioactive as the uranium and plutonium plus fission product currently being stored.

"Now, would anyone - who claims to be rational willingly choose to bury a refined product (spent fuel) that even after one cycle of use, still has a future potential gross electricity value of at least $130,000,000/tonne (or about 260 billion dollars for each year's worth of U.S. spent fuel) and is recyclable? It would be like junking a Mercedes after driving it for a few days. Even pure gold is worth only $14,000,000/tonne, and look how we protect and recover that."

John further points out that the total U. S. refined depleted uranium (DU) stockpile so far sitting at the surface and neglected, though managed, is about 5 times the potential energy contained in the entire Middle East oil resources.

My Comment: It takes 30 years to reverse the obvious from Jimmy Carters mistake. We may join the rest of the world after all.

Reprocessing method could allay weapons fear

Sir:

We believe that your worry about US plans to reprocess nuclear fuel ("Recycling the past" Nature 439, 509–510; 2006) is misplaced. Since President Carter imposed a reprocessing ban in 1977, it has become clear that other nations' decisions about building nuclear weapons do not depend on what the United States does with its spent fuel.

Furthermore, we consider your claim that "recycling involves separating components that can readily be used to build nuclear weapons" to be misleading on two counts. First, degraded plutonium in spent reactor fuel can only be used in an explosive device with considerable difficulty. Second, although current recycling processes produce pure plutonium that can be used for weapons, the US plan is to perfect a new method called UREX+, which would be configured so as never to separate weapons-quality plutonium.

UREX+ processing is the first step towards consuming excess plutonium in advanced, metal-fuelled fast reactors and reducing the rate at which reactor-grade plutonium is accumulating around the world. Moreover, fast reactors can extract more than 99% of the energy in mined uranium — over a hundred times better than the thermal reactors used today. The combination of recycling and fast reactors also reduces the time that waste needs to be isolated, from thousands of years to a few hundred.

There is still the associated problem that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty gives all signatories the right to develop a full-scale fuel cycle, and with it the technological infrastructure for making bombs. President Bush has begun to address this, by proposing that the spread of reprocessing technology be curtailed, with waste management and nuclear fuel supplied at reasonable cost—although to be acceptable, such a scheme should be run by an international entity such as the International Energy Agency or the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Properly managed, nuclear power can meet growing energy demand safely, cleanly and indefinitely.

Issue: Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) is reported today by Greenwire as saying recycling of spent nuclear fuel has "serious problems" and could create proliferation risks. She's wrong. But she is in typical far left company. President Jimmy Carter, during his illustrious administration, banned all nuclear fuel recycling because he feared nuclear weapons proliferation. Based on that ban, Hazel O'Leary, Energy Secretary under President Clinton, halted development at Argonne National Laboratory of the recycling method known as pyro-metallurgical recycling. This is the type of recycling being considered today by the Department of Energy and it does not increase the likelihood of nuclear weapons proliferation, does not produce anything that could be used for making bombs and, in fact, could turn decommissioned warheads into fuel that could be used in a new generation of fast reactors.

Comment 1: Ms. Clinton is obviously moving to appease her environmental fringe base that opposes the development of any energy sources, no matter how environmentally friendly they may be.

Comment 2: Recycling nuclear fuel would give us centuries of clean, safe electricity that is vital to our economic health and national security.

Comment 3: Recycling also resolves any problems involved with the storage of nuclear waste in the Yucca Mountain repository

Japanese nuclear plant starts test operation to reprocess depleted uranium TOKYO (The Associated Press) - Dec 21 - By MARI YAMAGUCHI Associated Press Writer A nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in northern Japan started tests with depleted uranium Tuesday, taking a major step in the country's closely watched efforts to use experimental reprocessed fuel to boost its energy self-sufficiency.

The test at Rokkasho, about 580 kilometers (360 miles) northeast of Tokyo, marks the first use of radioactive materials at the plant, said Masanori Hiroo, a spokesman for plant operator Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd. The plant is at the center of Japan's hopes of using a reprocessed fuel called mixed oxide, or MOX, in nuclear reactors. The 2.1 trillion yen (US$20 billion; euro14.95 billion) Rokkasho plant began operating in the early 1990s as a fuel storage site, and is expected to hold fuel and waste for up to 50 years. Since opening, it has taken in 779 tons (857 short tons) of spent fuel, more than a quarter of its capacity

The reprocessed fuel the plant is expected to eventually make could be used in reactors that burn a mixture of uranium and plutonium, or more advanced fast-breeder reactors, which use plutonium instead of uranium and produce more plutonium for use as fuel.

Nuclear power is at the center of resource-poor Japan's plans to become more energy independent. Japan's 52 active nuclear power plants supply more than one-third of its energy and government plans call for more production.

My comment: The Japanese do not worry about proliferation, nor are they encumbered by environmentalists. They have their priorities right.

News release: Knoxville News Sentinel May05, page B-1 says, "Uranium Hexafluoride on move to Ohio" to ". be processed into a more stable form for long-term storage.

" Meanwhile, DOE management are doing nothing to insure, in the long term, that we will be able to make practical use of that existing $70 trillion fuel material (Depleted Uranium Hexafluoride) which has the potential to supply the whole USA with 700 years of electrical energy.

This, a bird in our hand (700 years of fuel material and with technology developed by the US) is better than the pies in the sky (solar, wind, etc.) being evolved by DOE, its supporters and its contractors. If we opt for the bird in the hand, it will take a lot of hard work, dedication and time to recover our $70,000,000,000,000 fuel material and to attain the potential for 700 years of electricity for the whole country. In the mean time, on our present course, we will not attain the 700 years of electrical power, but will continue to support middle-Eastern activities with our oil dependency.

My explanation: Depleted Uranium Hexafluoride is a form of Uranium 238 which is not a fuel that will fission, but if deployed in a Fast Breeder Reactor it captures a neutron and becomes Plutonium 239 that will fission and produce energy. Some day our descendants in the distant future will look at us and say what fools we were.

The reason that spent LWR fuel is called “waste” today is that President Carter banned reprocessing in the hope that the U.S. persuade the rest of the world not to reprocess. Since the French, British, Russians, and Japanese are already reprocessing on a commercial scale and the rest of the world will soon follow suite as the worlds reserves of fossil fuels diminishes, it seems to many of us who work in the field that the U.S. should reverse its position and lead the world in the development of a diversion resistant pyroprocessing technology that Argonne National Laboratory has been investigating.