I have blogged before about the Chinese ambitions to expand nuclear power production in China and to export Chinese nuclear power reactors to foreign markets. The air pollution from burning coal has become a serious problem in many cities and it is estimated that forty thousand people die each year as a result of polluted air in China. China is a major emitter of green house gases and is seeking low carbon energy sources to fight climate change. The latest five year plan calls for the construction of forty new nuclear power reactors.
There is a major question looming with regard to the Chinese expansion of nuclear power. Should the spent fuel generated from all the nuclear power reactors be stored or should it be reprocesses to recover radioactive materials that could be used to fuel reactors? Although China has large uranium reserves, reprocessing spent fuel could reduce the need for uranium mining and processing. China has dedicated resources to the creation of what is called a closed fuel cycle where spent fuel is used to create new fuel. This research has been going on for decades.
One of the problems with reprocessing spent nuclear fuel is that one of the materials that can be recovered is plutonium which is useful for making nuclear weapons. China is a signatory of international treaties to prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons. Production of plutonium in China could lead to a nuclear arms race in southeast Asia.
China has criticized Japan for recovering enough plutonium from spent nuclear fuel through reprocessing to produce over a thousand nuclear bombs. Japan has constitutional prohibitions on the production of nuclear weapons but major production of plutonium through reprocessing spent fuel in China could lead to pressure to change that policy.
A new study from Harvard University that was co-authored by a senior Chinese nuclear engineer suggests that there are also economic reasons for China to give up on the closed fuel cycle. The use of reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel has declined for years around the world. It is expensive, very difficult technically and can't compete with the readily available uranium fuel that is being produced and sold. Reprocessing does reduce the level of radioactivity in spent nuclear fuel as well as the volume of waste. However, there is still a need to safely store and dispose of the waste that remains after reprocessing.
China is able to produce enough uranium fuel from internal deposits for estimated needs for decades. Dry cask storage technology can keep waste safety stored for decades while a permanent geological repository can be developed. Reprocessing fuel from the expanded fleet of reactors would require a huge expenditure in research, development and infrastructure while not removing the need for the expense of waste storage and disposal. In plain and simple terms, serious estimates of comparative costs strongly indicate that an open fuel cycle with uranium fuel production and waste storage and disposal will be much cheaper than a closed fuel cycle with reprocessing of spent fuel to produce more fuel.
China is planning for the construction of a new used fuel reprocessing plant. They are also considering a larger reprocessing project that would be shared with Areva, the French nuclear company. The cost of the Areva project would be about twenty eight billion dollars.
In addition to the question of whether to create new uranium fuel or reprocess spent fuel, there is also the question of whether or not China should be expanding nuclear power production at all. Since the Fukushima disaster in March of 2011, there has been increasing public resistance to new nuclear power reactors and a call to focus on sustainable alternative power instead.
