Event Details

Abstract: Nuclear fuel recycling processes are well established and the recovery of U and Pu for the fabrication of new fuel has been successfully operated over several decades.

However, the increasing usage of mixed metal oxide (MOx) fuels in LWR’s across Europe and Japan, combined with the need to reduce the volume of waste arising from spent nuclear fuel, continues to drive the need for cleaner, more efficient reprocessing plants and routes to manufacturer for MOx fuel pellets.Within the UK Nuclear Innovation Programme, work has begun on the development of high Pu content MOx fuel fabrication processes which aim to reduce the heavy metal throughput of reprocessing plants while maintaining a level of proliferation resistance with the use of U / Pu co-treatment stages throughout. As a contribution to this, a rapid and clean photochemical process for the reduction of U (VI) and co-reduction of U (VI) / Ce (IV) (as a Pu surrogate) is under development at Lancaster University.