Used nuclear fuel recycling France

The recycle weapons fuel cycle rehes on the reservoir of SWUs and yellow cake equivalents represented by the fissile materials in decommissioned nuclear weapons. This variation impacts the prereactor portion of the fuel cycle. The post-reactor portion can be either classical or throwaway. Because the avadabihty of weapons-grade fissile material for use as an energy source is a relatively recent phenomenon, it has not been fully implemented. As of early 1995 the United States had purchased highly enriched uranium from Russia, and France had initiated a modification and expansion of the breeder program to use plutonium as the primary fuel (3). AH U.S. reactor manufacturers were working on designs to use weapons-grade plutonium as fuel. 

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). 

However, in both the US and Canada, there is no recycling of used fuel allowed by political edict, which is not the case in, say, India, Russia, and France. This ban is a legacy again of Cold War thinking and public antipathy to the use of nuclear energy. 

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