Speaker
Description
France has a strong tradition for recycling spent nuclear fuels. A goal has been to minimize the build-up of plutonium, which inevitably is a bi-product of uranium fueled water-cooled reactor operation. Despite their efforts into minimization of plutonium through the twice-through fuel cycle strategy and Mixed Oxide (MOX) fuels, their plutonium inventory is steadily increasing. However, recycling plutonium more than twice is difficult: Reactor irradiation changes the isotopic composition of plutonium, decreasing its quality by each re-use.
This project has investigated whether multi-recycling of plutonium is possible through the mixing of spent fuels of different plutonium quality, a method called multi-MOX (MMOX). The research has been conducted at ICJLab in Orsay, France, using their fuel cycle simulation tool CLASS.
We compare MMOX with different scenarios (using only UOX fuel, continue with MOX and the innovative MIX strategy) and find that the MMOX strategy has positive effects on minimizing the plutonium inventory and also other aspects of the fuel cycle, as uranium savings and storage needs.
