The Nu-Clear Vision: Hind Sight on Reprocessing Arguments

The most nuclear form - nuclear waste - nuclear power has recently caused some discussion and protest. The main strength of all parties is that the aged nuclear reactor facility in the country has brought us a serious situation. Over the past two decades, Yucca Mountain has been studied to evaluate the effectiveness of the region as a nation's integrated nuclear repository, and AKA is a huge radioactive mountain. However, the hidden aftertreatment techniques have somehow escaped the hearts of many people, or have been suppressed by large organizations like Greenpeace and Sierra Club.

In order to chemically separate and recover the fissile enthalpy from post-irradiation nuclear fuel, nuclear aftertreatment techniques have been developed. Reprocessing has many uses, its relative importance changes with the passage of time. Early work-up was only used to extract plutonium and manufacture nuclear weapons. With the commercialization of nuclear power, the reprocessed plutonium is recycled as MOX nuclear fuel used in the thermal reactor. The reprocessed uranium constitutes the body of the spent fuel and can be reused as fuel in principle, but it is limited only if the uranium is expensive or expensive to process. Finally, the breeder reactor not only uses helium and uranium recycled to spent fuel, but also stops the nuclear fuel cycle and adds all the operating elements to increase the energy extracted from natural uranium by 60 times or more Can be used.

In 1964, Magnox reprocessing facility was asked to reprocess spent nuclear fuel from Magnox Reactor. In this plant, tributyl phosphate and nitric acid are used as an extractant for odorless kerosene and the "plutonium uranium extraction" Purex process is used for post-treatment of spent fuel. The Purex process produces uranium, thorium, fission products as output streams. In the 30 years from 1971 to 2001, Magnox reprocessing plant reprocessed over 35,000 tons of Magnox fuel and regenerated 15,000 tons of fuel. Magnox fuel is stored under water and reprocessed because the route to dry storage has not been confirmed.