The Need for Integrating the Back End of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle in the United States of America
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MRS Advances © 2018 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 re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. DOI: 10.1557/adv.2018.231
The Need for Integrating the Back End of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle in the United States of America Evaristo J. Bonano, Elena A. Kalinina, and Peter N. Swift Advanced Nuclear Energy Programs, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA 87185
ABSTRACT Current practice for commercial spent nuclear fuel management in the United States of America (US) includes storage of spent fuel in both pools and dry storage cask systems at nuclear power plants. Most storage pools are filled to their operational capacity, and management of the approximately 2,200 metric tons of spent fuel newly discharged each year requires transferring older and cooler fuel from pools into dry storage. In the absence of a repository that can accept spent fuel for permanent disposal, projections indicate that the US will have approximately 134,000 metric tons of spent fuel in dry storage by mid-century when the last plants in the current reactor fleet are decommissioned. Current designs for storage systems rely on large dual-purpose (storage and transportation) canisters that are not optimized for disposal. Various options exist in the US for improving integration of management practices across the entire back end of the nuclear fuel cycle.
INTRODUCTION Spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive wastes have been generated in the United States of America (US) since the early 1940s. By the time the first commercial power plant came into service in the US in 1957, there was a growing recognition that deep geologic disposal was the best available option for permanently isolating highly radioactive wastes [1]. Every nation that has pursued nuclear power has subsequently come to the same conclusion: deep geologic disposal is the preferred option for isolating spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste [2-4]. Six decades after the beginning of commercial nuclear power, however, no nation has an operating deep geologic disposal facility for commercial nuclear waste. For most of the early history of commercial nuclear power in the US, including the period of rapid expansion in the late 1960s and 1970s, electric utility companies operated reactors with an expectation that spent nuclear fuel would be reprocessed to recover fissionable material for use in new reactor fuel. A modest amount (640 metric tons) of spent nuclear fuel was reprocessed between 1966 and 1972 at the privatelyoperated Western New York Nuclear Service Center near West Valley, New York, but the reprocessing facility was closed in 1972 [5], and no commercial reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel has occurred in the US since then. The federal government suspended efforts to develop additional reprocessing facilities in 1976 [
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