Used fuel from nuclear power facilities

Fuel reprocessing Commercial-scale reprocessing of irradiated spent fuel from nuclear power facilities to recover uranium and plutonium is performed only in France and the UK. Some other countries such as Japan, India, and the Netherlands have small facilities. The used fuel elements contain high levels of radioactive materials. But remote operations and heavy shielding insure a low annual effective dose of 1.5 mSv for the workers. 

Among common radionuclide sources are the natural environment, fallout from nuclear weapon tests, effluents from nuclear research laboratories, the nuclear power fuel cycle, radiopharmaceutical development, manufacturing, and various application, teaching and research uses. Decontamination and decommissioning activities at former nuclear facilities and the potential of terrorist radionuclide uses are current topics of interest for radioanalytical chemistry laboratories. Simplified information on the numerous radionuclides is conveniently found in Charts of the Nuclides such as Nuclides and Isotopes (revised by J. R. Parrington, H. D. Knox, S. L. Breneman, E. M. Baum, and F. Feiner, 15th Edition, 1996, distributed by GE Nuclear Energy). 

The Idaho Chemical Processing Plant is a versatile, multipurpose facility used for recovering highly enriched uranium from a variety of fuels in naval propulsion, research, and test reactors. Materials processed [Al] include aluminum-alloyed, zirconium-alloyed, stainless steel-based, and graphite-based fuels. The West Valley plant, although designed primarily for low-enriched uranium fuel from power reactors, also processed plutonium-enriched and thorium-based fuels. It is the only U.S. plant to have reprocessed fuel from commercial nuclear power plants. 

Traditional large-scale nuclear power systems are quite proliferation-resistant. The fresh LEU fuel is of too low enrichment to be directly used in a weapon. The reactors are ill-suited for illicit irradiation and production of weapons material. Plutonium in spent fuel has poor isotopics for weapons applications, and is inherently protected by the significant radiation field arising from the fission product inventory. Even so, safeguards of LWR plants are needed because none of these barriers to proliferation risk is, by itself, completely effective. Diverted fresh fuel could be used to reduce the enrichment effort, given appropriate facilities. Fertile materials could, with difficulty, be irradiated in LWRs. The radiation barrier inherent to spent fuel decays with time, and plutonium from LWR spent fuel is considered a weapons-useable material, even if not ideal. 

Whether the components are sourced from other facilitates or manufactured within, when the final assembly is complete, the fuel is ready to be shipped to a nuclear power plant and inserted into a reactor during a scheduled refueling outage. Fuel fabrication facilities used for commercial power reactors are large, industrial-scale manufacturing... 

Dose estimates from other measured environmental samples are many orders of magnitude loiver than the estimates calculated in the previous sections for a concentration of 1 pCi m in air. The peak concentration of 2 pCi L as determined in milk samples near the Nuclear Fuel Services plant, would require maintenance of an air concentration of 1.7 X 10 pCi m , according to the model used above. Concentrations of in air around nuclear power plants are so much lower than those calculated for air around fuel processing facilities that they are essentially undetectable. 

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