Uranium enriched, cost

In plutonium-fueled breeder power reactors, more plutonium is produced than is consumed (see Nuclearreactors, reactor types). Thus the utilisa tion of plutonium as a nuclear energy or weapon source is especially attractive to countries that do not have uranium-enrichment faciUties. The cost of a chemical reprocessing plant for plutonium production is much less than that of a uranium-235 enrichment plant (see Uranium and uranium compounds). Since the end of the Cold War, the potential surplus of Pu metal recovered from the dismantling of nuclear weapons has presented a large risk from a security standpoint. 

Opportunities for Cost deduction in the Ttecontamination and Decommissioning of the Nation s Uranium Enrichment Facilities,V3.tLoaA Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 1996. 

In the last twenty odd years, almost all nuclear endeavors in the U.S. have run into bureaucratic and litigious delays, making their schedules and costs unpredictable. In addition to reactor construction, there are the bureaucratic delays in the waste repository programs. Another example is the attempt to build a new uranium enrichment plant in the state of Louisiana, a plant which uses advanced technology demonstrated in several countries in Europe. Licensing started over seven years ago and is still held up by issues without relevance to technology or safety. It is approaching the point where the delays, and costs may lead to the abandonment of a potential asset... 

One kilogram of fuel provides 360 mWh of electrical energy (1.22 gBtu). To obtain 1 kilo of fuel requires 9 kilos of uranium. The cost of conversion, enrichment, and fuel fabrication results in a total cost of about 4,000/kg. Therefore, the fuel cost is 1.1c/kWh or 3.22/mBtu. 

Much of the impetus for the awakened interest and utilization of inorganic membranes recently came hom a history of about forty or fifty years of some large scale successes of porous ceramic membranes for gaseous diffusion to enrich uranium in the military weapons and nuclear power reactor applications. In the gaseous diffusion literature, the porous membranes are referred to as the porous barriers. For nuclear power generation, uranium enrichment can account for approximately 10% of the operating costs (Charpin and Rigny, 1989]. 

The main advantage of a heavy water reactor is that it eliminates the need for building expensive uranium enrichment facilities. However, D2O must be prepared by either fractional distillation or electrolysis of ordinary water, which can be very expensive considering the amount of water used in a nuclear reactor. In countries where hydroelectric power is abundant, the cost of producing D2O by electrolysis can be reasonably low. At present, Canada is the only nation successfully using heavy water nuclear reactors. The fact that no enriched uranium is required in a heavy water reactor allows a country to enjoy the benefits of nuclear power without undertaking work that is closely associated with weapons technology. 

The unit cost of enriched uranium in the form of UFj depends on the U content of the uranium, the price paid for the natural uranium from which the uranium was enriched, the cost of the separative work expended in enriching the uranium, and the composition of the tails stream containing depleted uranium leaving the uranium enrichment plant. The procedure for calculating the cost of enriched uranium is described in Chap. 12. The unit costs... 

If natural uranium costs 100/kg uranium and separative work 125/kg SWU, what is the cost, in dollars per kilogram uranium product, of producing uranium enriched to 90 w/o from natural uranium feed while stripping tails to 0.3 w/o U To 0.2 w/o ... 

An important example of pressure diffusion (1) is the current worldwide competition to perfect a low-cost gas centrifuge capable of industrial-scale separation of the and U, gaseous hexafluoride isotopes. To date, atomic bomb and atomic power self-sufficiency has been limited to major powers since the underdeveloped countries have neither the money nor an industrial base to build the huge multi-billion dollar gaseous diffusion (2) plants currently required for uranium enrichment. In these plants, typified by the U.S. Oak Ridge Operation, and Up6 are separated by forcing a gaseous mixture of the... 

Light-water-moderated reactors must bear the cost of enriching all of their fuel in U throughout their lives. Heavy-water-moderated (HWM) reactors avoid this, but must bear the initial cost of producing heavy water. Once produced, however, only minor losses of heavy water occur (typically Uranium enrichment and heavy water production are isotope separations of comparable difficulty. The separation factors exploited in isotope separation are larger for deuterium and protium than for... 

Developmenf work continued to further increase the output and reduce the cost of fhe machines while consfruction of the plant proceeded. However, in June 1985, the Department of Energy (DOE) made the decision (after an expenditure of nearly 3 billion) to shut down the centrifuge plant and concentrate on the development of the AVLIS process for uranium enrichment at LLNL. 

The economics of switching from natural uranium to SEU depend on the cost of uranium, the cost of enrichment, and the burnup achieved by the SEU fuel. Use of slight enrichment is even more attractive if the enriched material is RU. 

Fuel costs are composed of the cost of mining uranium, the cost of converting it into uranium hexafluoride, the cost of enriching the uranium hexafluoride, the cost of converting the enriched material to UO2, and the cost of manufacturing the fuel assembly. 

Due to the current low costs of natural uranium and uranium enrichment, the use of uranium dioxide fuel with postponed reprocessing and spent fuel storage on the nuclear power plant site, are economically preferable for SVBR-75/100 at the moment. The duration of the benefits of this fuel cycle option depends on the available uranium resources and nuclear power deployment scale. In any case, the existing uranium resources are sufficient to achieve the realistic scenario of nuclear power development until the year 2050. The costs of natural gas could be expected to increase more intensively than the costs of natural uranium. This will ensure the NPP competitiveness even with a considerable increase in uranium prices, because the structure of electricity cost is different for NPPs and fossil-fuelled heat power plants. 

Offers a tool for nuclear power sector to protect against potential rises in uranium prices, hy providing MOX and recycled UOX (uranium oxide) fuel 5, whose production cost is independent of uranium prices and enrichment costs. ... 

As indicated in Section V,C the enrichment costs charged by the AEC have already risen to 32/swu since the time the calculations presented here were made. The assumed increase to 35/swu can thus be considered as a very likely development for enrichment costs in the United States and they are furthermore in accordance with the present estimates for a European diffusion plant (9). These higher enrichment costs will only be of importance in the earlier years for the converter/breeder cases, when the fraction of reactors using enriched uranium is still relatively high. 

Supply Projections. Additional supphes are expected to be necessary to meet the projected production shortfall. A significant contribution is likely to come from uranium production centers such as Eastern Europe and Asia, which are not included in the capabihty projections (27). The remaining shortfall between fresh production and reactor requirements is expected to be filled by several alternative sources, including excess inventory drawdown. These shortfalls could also be met by the utili2ation of low cost resources that could become available as a result of technical developments or pohcy changes, production from either low or higher cost resources not identified in production capabihty projections, recycled material such as spent fuel, and low enriched uranium converted from the high enriched uranium (HEU) found in warheads (28). 

The cost of enriched material from a gaseous diffusion plant depends both on the cost of separative work and of feed material. It can be seen from equation 15 that if the optimum tails concentration from a gaseous diffusion plant is 0.25%, the ratio of the cost of a kg of normal uranium to the cost of a kg of separative work equal to 0.80 is impfled. Because the cost of separative work in new gaseous diffusion plants is expected to be about 100/SWU, equation 16 gives the cost per kg of uranium containing 4% as about 1,240. 

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