Spent fuel license

The licensing process consists of two steps construction and operating license that must be completed before fuel loading. Licensing covers radiological safety, environmental protection, and antitru,st considerations. Activities not defined as production or utilization of special nuclear material (SNM), use simple one-step. Materials Licenses, for the possession of radioactive materials. Examples are uranium mills, solution recovery plants, UO fabrication plants, interim spent fuel storage, and isotopic separation plants. 

Nuclear waste. The nuclear waste disposal scheme remains to be finalized. The Yucca Mountain project in Nevada has made good advances recently, and when licensed it can provide a destination for the spent fuel accumulating at the plant sites. The development of a closed fuel cycle that involves the extraction and use of the fissile contents from the irradiated fuel would reduce the long-lived radioactivity associated with the waste to be sent to the repository. 

U.S. spent fuel policy since it forbade DOE from taking title to SNF until a permanent repository was approved for construction (ref 6.2). In fact, private interim storage facilities have been proposed. A utility consortium signed an agreement with a Utah Indian tribe in December 1996 to build a 40,000 MT storage facility in the desert west of Salt Lake City. Proceedings to license the facility are still on-going (ref 6.3). 

Yucca Mountain, even if licensed to receive spent fuel in 2010, only has the capacity to absorb the output of commercial U.S. spent fuel production and existing storage through about 2015. Consequently, President Bush in his National Energy Policy issued in May 2001 (ref 6.1) recommended ... 

AR505 3.50 Standard format and content for a license application to store spent fuel and high-level... 

Under a site-specific license, an applicant submits a license application to NRC and the NRC performs a technical review of all the safety aspects of the proposed ISFSI. If the application is approved, the NRC issues a license that is valid for 40 years, which can be further renewed for additional time periods. A spent fuel storage license contains technical requirements and operating conditions (fuel specifications, cask leak testing, surveillance, and other requirements) for the ISFSI and specifies what the licensee is authorized to store at the site. 

Since the first ISFSI was first licensed in 1986, and the first generic cask certificates were awarded in the 1990s with license periods of 20 years, there has been a need to "renew" the storage facilities and cask certificates for additional periods of time. This has been necessitated by the failure of the DOE to satisfy its contractural obligation to accept the spent fuel from utilities and take title to the fuel. Therefore, the spent fuel continues to be stored and maintained at each facility license imder Part 72. 

A quantity of about 850 t of UO2 spent fuel is reprocessed annually in France according to Carre and Delbecq (2009), as a result of trade-off between optimizing plutonium recycling and power generation. Thus, about 100 t of MOX fuel are fabricated annually and recycled once into twenty 900 MW licensed reactors (30% of core), which contributes to about 10% of nuclear production. In the same way, reprocessed uranium (REPU) recovered from spent fuel is used today to fuel two 900 MW reactors, which may be expanded depending on the associated economic benefit (Figure 14.32). 

Likewise, there is a need to establish the feasibility of converting the ENHS module into a licensed shipping package for fresh and, primarily, spent fuel. 

Verified that the structures and systems required for containing, cooling, cleaning, level monitoring and makeup of water in the spent fuel pool (SFP) were operable and adequate, consistent with the licensing basis, to preclude high levels of radionuclides in the pool water and adverse effects on stored fuel, SFP, fuel transfer components, and related equipment. 

These are fine and desirable goals, but they do contain increased specific costs, at least for the first few units that have to bear the development, licensing, and production-line semp. In addition, the issue has been discussed of the relative safety for multiple units that are co-located and may share interactions between systems and shared facilities. To date, most licensing and builds had been on the basis of one unit at a time, despite the presence or co-location of other facilities. This was also highlighted by Fukushima, because of the presence of spent fuel pools at the site, with the potential for additional activity release. 

The extent to which differences in waste classification and approaches to waste management may impede the disposal of high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel is not yet clear because of uncertainties in the final waste forms intended for disposal and the fact that siting and licensing of a repository is still in the investigative phase. 

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