Integration of the Back-end of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle: An Overview
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MRS Advances © 2020 Materials Research Society.This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. DOI: 10.1557/adv.2020.101
Integration of the Back-end of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle: An Overview François Diaz-Maurin 1,2 and Rodney C. Ewing 1,3 1
Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA Amphos 21 Consulting SL, C/ Venezuela 103, 08019 Barcelona, Spain 3 Department of Geological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
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ABSTRACT Recent efforts have been made toward the integration of the back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle in the United States. The back-end integration seeks to address several management challenges: 1) current storage practices are not optimized for transport and disposal; 2) the impact of interim storage on the disposal strategy needs to be evaluated; and 3) the back-end is affected by—and affects—nuclear fuel cycle and energy policy choices. The back-end integration accounts for the various processes of nuclear waste management—onsite storage, consolidated storage, transport and geological disposal. Ideally, these processes should be fully coupled so that benefits and impacts can be assessed at the level of the full fuel cycle. The paper summarizes the causes and consequences of the absence of integration at the backend of the nuclear fuel cycle in the U.S., critically reviews ongoing integration efforts, and suggests a framework that would support the back-end integration.
INTRODUCTION Despite decades of scientific research, engineering analysis, and policy formulation efforts no repository for the geological disposal of highly-radioactive waste is currently operating worldwide. Almost all national efforts to site geologic repositories encountered either public opposition or technical difficulties [1]. In the United States, despite plans for geological disposal, the nuclear waste management (NWM) program, so far, has not gone beyond the surface storage at independent spent fuel storage installations (ISFSIs), all located at or near reactor sites. As of end of 2017, approximately 82,500 metric tons of commercial spent fuel were stored at 79 different locations, including 64 operating reactor sites, spread in 34 states [2]. If no disposal facility becomes available, projections indicate that about 140,000 metric tons of spent
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fuel will be in surface storage by 2050 [3]. To accelerate the removal of spent fuel from reactor sites, proposals have been made in Congress toward the introduction of consolidated interim storage facilities [4]. Interim storage seeks to act as a tempo
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