Abstract
The spent fuel from the nuclear power reactors is being stored in repositories and dry casks in many countries of the world. However, it does not solve the main problem of the spent fuel, which is the high radiotoxicity of fuel for a long term. A new strategy is required to close the nuclear fuel cycle, and for the sustainability of the nuclear power generation. This strategy could be the plutonium recycling to obtain more energy and recycle the Minor actinides produced during the irradiation, to transmute them into less radioactive products.
Highlights
The idea of recycle the spent nuclear fuel is not new
We assess the amounts of Minor actinides generated in different fuel designs and the amounts of Minor actinides remaining after recycle them in a thermal reactor
It was performed a reference cell made of enriched uranium, later the fuel of this UOX fuel is changed to MOX fuel using depleted uranium as a matrix, were several plutonium concentrations were used to determine the amounts of minor actinides generated on each
Summary
The idea of recycle the spent nuclear fuel is not new. Since the beginning of the nuclear era, the fuel reprocessing has been a fundamental part of plutonium recovery for the use of nuclear weapons. The strategy used in this work was the following; first, it was necessary to establish the material of study for the actinides generation This material was the commercial uranium oxide fuel and take it as a reference, to design a MOX fuel cell. Starting with the uranium oxide fuel, this MOX design was made scaling the radial uranium enrichments to plutonium concentrations making use of a Fissile Material Ratio (FMR) which was found in previous work as the equivalent in a MOX fuel cycle. It is a relation between the uranium enrichments to concentrations of reactor grade plutonium, to obtain the MOX fuel cell [2]. The thermal reactor proposed for the irradiation is a BWR reactor, currently in operation at 2027 MWth with a fuel cycle length of 18 months, and an average fuel burnup of 47.5GWd/TU during four power cycles
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