My recent posts have been about breeder reactors which generate more fissile material than they consume. There is renewed global interest in breeder reactors for the production of nuclear fuel and the destruction of nuclear waste. Today's post is going to be about the renaming and refunding of an international cooperative initiative launched by the United States.
The GNEP became the International Framework for Nuclear Energy Cooperation (IFNEC) in mid-2010 and there is renewed effort and funding in the United States to carry out the intent of the original GNEP proposal. This addresses both the proliferation concerns and the disposal of nuclear waste. Currently the likely supplier nations with fully developed nuclear technology would be the U.S., the U.K., France, Russia and Japan. User nations could be any of the other members of the cooperative framework.
There are serious problems with temporary spent nuclear repositories filling up around the world. In the United States, all the spent fuel pools in all the reactors will be filled within the next five years. With the cancellation of the Yucca Mountain nuclear fuel repository, that means that currently the only other choice would be to build more dry casks for temporary storage onsite.
The Statement of Principles for the GNEP was signed by most of the 31 members of the IFNEC. The goals of the Principles include a process in which supplier nations would send nuclear fuel to user nations. When the fuel was spent, it would be sent back to supplier nations. The spent fuel would then be processed to separate the uranium and plutonium as well as other transuranics. This mixture could then be burned in new advanced reactors. In the process, the amount of waste that required disposal would be greatly reduced along with the time required for the radiation to drop to a safe level. This would help solve the spent fuel disposal problem in the U.S. and across the world. The International Atomic Energy Agency would oversee this process and insure that all nuclear materials were tightly controlled. One of the benefits to the user nations for refraining from developing enrichment and reprocessing technologies would be the assurance that they would have a steady flow of nuclear fuel and a removal of spent nuclear fuel.
One of the main conventional chemical processes used to separate plutonium from spent nuclear fuel is known as PUREX. The use of this process has resulted in the accumulation of over two hundred and forty tons of reactor grade plutonium worldwide. Although this plutonium is not suitable for nuclear weapons use, it can be fed into other processes that will generate weapons-grade plutonium. New reprocessing technologies are being developed under the IFNEC that would create a mixture of plutonium, uranium and other transuranics that would be suitable for fuel but would not be suitable for nuclear weapon manufacture. This would achieve one of the main goals of the IFNEC to reduce the dangers of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. There are currently experiments being done in France on burning this type of fuel mixture.
Work proceeds today on the development of reprocessing technologies, advanced reactor designs and the legal framework needed to control the flow of nuclear materials and waste products. There is also work being done on the development of small reactors for small electric grids in developing countries.
