Cooling Pool at AREVA's La Hague Recycling Facility

Power Engineering’s most recent issue included a great piece on the need to rethink the situation for recycling nuclear fuel in the United States.

The article by Senior Editor Nancy Spring points out the key benefits that come from recycling used nuclear fuel. “In ballpark figures, it takes around 30 metric tons of fuel each year to power a 1,000 MW nuclear power plant. That creates 20 tons of waste. Because 96 percent of each fuel assembly is re-useable, with recycling the volume of waste is reduced by a factor of five. Radiotoxicity is reduced by a factor of 10 because the lower the volume of waste, the lower its toxicity. Plus, plutonium is removed from the final waste stream.”

Spring also notes how AREVA “operates the largest nuclear fuel reprocessing/recycling plant in the world. At the La Hague facility in northwest France, spent fuel from 90 to 100 nuclear reactors can be recycled each year, separated into uranium, plutonium and fission products, each one bound for the next use or final storage,” which is why she recently went to interview AREVA’s Remi Coulon.

As the director of the back-end sector, strategy and international projects, he answered some tough questions about the future of nuclear energy and recycling in the United States. “As you see, this won’t happen overnight, but we are honestly convinced that this is a sustainable path worth pursuing. Under appropriate conditions, the industry believes it is possible to privately finance such a project with the right guarantees. This project will fuel the economy for decades with recycled fuel, while contributing to solving a long-lasting national commitment regarding nuclear waste,” Coulon said.

For the complete article and interview, check out Power Engineering.

Nancy Spring, Editor of Nuclear Power International, presents a piece titled “Shovels in the Ground,” which offers a world tour of ongoing nuclear energy projects. Among other projects in China, India, and Japan, she highlights the AREVA EPR plants being built at the Flamanville site in France and at Olkiluoto in Finland. She goes on to write:

Based on that roster of projects alone, the argument could easily be made that the debate about whether the nuclear renaissance is happening has been decided. And while there’s a big difference between “having plans” and pouring concrete—which at Flamanville 3 can be 200 tonnes per hour from the onsite concrete plant—if the plans for future nuclear projects that many countries have developed are added into the equation, the renaissance is already in full swing.

The question in the U.S. then becomes when to participate.

She ends her piece with a warning:

Many scholars and historians consider the Renaissance of the 1400s as the period when modern science began. Like those in that era who did not embrace the new concepts, the U.S. could choose to not take part in the nuclear renaissance. Would we then be saying “no” to science? The U.S., with its ambivalence toward nuclear power, may remain in the Dark Ages when it comes to energy.