Transmutation and the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership
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0985-NN14-02
Transmutation and the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership James Bresee Office of the Asst. Sec. for Nuclear Energy, Global Nuclear Energy Parternship (NE-2.4), U.S. Department of Energy, 1000 Independence Ave. SW, Washington, DC, 20585 BACKGROUND In the January 2006 State of the Union address, President Bush announced a new Advanced Energy Initiative, a significant part of which is the Global Nuclear Energy Initiative. Its details were described on February 6, 2006 by the U.S. Secretary of Energy. In summary, it has three parts: (1) a program to expand nuclear energy use domestically and in foreign countries to support economic growth while reducing the release of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. (2) an expansion of the U.S. nuclear infrastructure that will lead to the recycling of spent fuel and a closed fuel cycle and, through transmutation, a reduction in the quantity and radiotoxicity of nuclear waste and its proliferation concerns, and (3) a partnership with other fuel cycle nations to support nuclear power in additional nations by providing small nuclear power plants and leased fuel with the provision that the resulting spent fuel would be returned by the lessee to the lessor. The final part would have the effect of stabilizing the number of fuel cycle countries with attendant non-proliferation value. Details will be given later in the paper. Commercial spent fuel recycling, pioneered in the U.S., has not been carried out since the nineteen seventies following a decision by President Carter to forego fuel reprocessing and to recommend similar practices by other countries. However, many nations have continued spent fuel reprocessing, generally using the U.S.-developed PUREX process. The latest to do so are Japan, which began operations of an 800 metric tons (tonnes) per year PUREX reprocessing plant at Rokkasho-mura in northern Honshu in 2006 and China, which recently began operations of a separations pilot plant, also using PUREX. Countries using the PUREX process, recycle the separated plutonium to light water reactors (LWRs) in a mixed plutonium/uranium oxide fuel called MOX. Plutonium recycling in LWRs, which are used for electricity production in all nuclear power nations, reduces, somewhat, the uranium ore and enrichment requirements at a given level of power production, but has the disadvantage of producing non-fissile plutonium isotopes and the so-called minor actinides (neptunium, americium and curium), some of which act as neutron poisons, and thus, require increasing uranium enrichment, eventually raising fuel costs beyond practical limits. The French only use one recycle of plutonium in their power reactors. The future ìburningî (transmutation by fission) of used plutonium (and the other transuranics1) could, if put into large-scale practice, eliminate one of the more serious proliferation problems in the world today, the accumulation of large quantities of separated civilian plutonium. It is generally accepted by the worldís technical community that the effective way to transmut
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