Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology

The technical feasibility of a pyroprocessing of PWR spent fuels to recover nuclear fuel materials, uranium and transuranic elements group(TRU), was examined in this study. Also its applicability as a new fuel cycle technology in terms of non-proliferation was investigated. First, various unit processes were combined to a pyroprocess. Then the flow aspects of such materials of issue as uranium, transuraniums, rare earth, noble metals and heat generating elements were examined on the flowsheet, which was obtained by the assumptions on the basis of various experimental results in this work or separation data collected from literatures. Consequently, the calculated results of the material balance for the whole process showed that uranium and TRU could be recovered as products by 98.4 % and 97.0 %, respectively, from a PWR spent fuel while removing the other elemental groups into radioactive wastes. On the one hand, the TRU product was found to emit a considerable amount of ϒ-ray as well as neutrons favorably contributing to the strategy of proliferation resistance.

Keywords

Pyroprocessing of spent fuel,Nuclear fuel cycle,Separation of uranium and TRU,Non-proliferation