Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology

Status on the spent nuclear fuel management policy and R&D plan of the major countries is surveyed. Also the prospect of the future R&D plan is suggested. Recently so-called fuel cycle nations, which have the reprocess policy of the spent fuel, announced new spent fuel management policy based on the advanced fuel cycle technology. The policy is focused to transmute highly radioactive material and material having a very long half-life, and to recycle the Pu and U contained in the spent fuel. In this way the radio-toxity of the spent fuel as well as the amount of the high level waste to be eventually disposed can greatly be reduced. Most of countries selected the wet process as a primary option for the treatment of the spent fuel since the advanced wet process, which is based on the existing PUREX process, looks more feasible as compared with the dry process. The wet process, however, is much more sensitive in terms of proliferation-resistance compared with the dry process. The pure Pu can easily be obtained by simply modifying the process. On the other hand the pure Pu can not be extracted in the dry process based on the high temperature molten salt process such as a pyroprocess. Even though the pyroprocess technology is very premature, it has a great merit. Thus it is necessary for Korea to have a long term strategy for pursuing a spent fuel treatment technology with a proliferation resistance and a great merit for the GEN-IV fuel cycles. Pyroprocess is one of the best candidates to satisfy these purposes.

Keywords

spent fuel,treatment,wet process,dry process,fuel cycle