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The first large-scale nuclear reactors were built during World War II.These reactors were designed for the production of plutonium for use in nuclear weapons.The only reprocessing required, therefore, was the extraction of the plutonium (free of fission-product contamination) from the spent natural uranium fuel.
Commercial LWR spent nuclear fuel contains on average (excluding cladding) only four percent plutonium, minor actinides and fission products by weight. Despite it often containing more fissile material than natural uranium , reuse of reprocessed uranium has not been common because of low prices in the uranium market of recent decades, and ...
If these constituent portions of spent fuel were reused, and additional wastes that may come as a byproduct of reprocessing are limited, reprocessing could ultimately reduce the volume of waste that needs to be disposed. Alternatively, the intact spent nuclear fuel can be directly disposed of as high-level radioactive waste.
It has been kept at the site and has been piling up for decades in a form that would allow it to be recycled into new nuclear fuel. But the government has now decided that it will not be reused ...
Nuclear fuel process A graph comparing nucleon number against binding energy Close-up of a replica of the core of the research reactor at the Institut Laue-Langevin. Nuclear fuel refers to any substance, typically fissile material, which is used by nuclear power stations or other nuclear devices to generate energy.
Reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel by the PUREX method, first developed in the 1940s to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons, [1] was demonstrated commercially in Belgium to partially re-fuel a LWR in the 1960s. [2] This aqueous chemical process continues to be used commercially to separate reactor grade plutonium (RGPu) for reuse as MOX fuel ...
Workers have begun loading radioactive fuel into a second new nuclear reactor in Georgia, utilities said Thursday, putting the reactor on a path to begin generating electricity in the coming months.
At Indian Point nuclear power plant, 125 hardened casks of spent radioactive fuel sit idle, waiting until someone can figure out how to safely transport and dispose of them.. So far, no one's come ...