nuclear reprocessing

[mr friendly guy]

watch this space

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese scientists have made a breakthrough in spent fuel reprocessing technology that could potentially solve China's uranium supply problem, state television reported on Monday.

The technology, developed and tested at the No.404 Factory of China National Nuclear Corp in the Gobi desert in remote Gansu province, enables the re-use of irradiated fuel and is able to boost the usage rate of uranium materials at nuclear plants by 60 folds.

"With the new technology, China's existing detected uranium resources can be used for 3,000 years," Chinese Central Television reported.

China, as well as France, the United Kingdom and Russia, actively supports reprocessing as a means for the management of highly radioactive spent fuel and as a source of fissile material for future nuclear fuel supply.

But independent scientists argued that commercial application of nuclear fuel reprocessing has always been hindered by cost, technology, proliferation risk and safety challenges.

China has 171,400 tons of proven uranium resources spread mainly in eight provinces -- Jiangxi, Guangdong, Hunan, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Liaoning and Yunnan.

China is planning a massive push into nuclear power in an effort to wean itself off coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. It now has 12 working reactors with 10.15 gigawatt of total generating capacity.

China has set an official target of 40 gigawatts (GW) of installed nuclear generating capacity by 2020, but the government indicated it could double the goal to about 80 GW as faster expansion was one of the more feasible solutions for achieving emissions reduction goals.

As such, China will need to source more than 60 percent of the uranium needed for its nuclear power plants from overseas by 2020, even if the country moves forward with a modest nuclear expansion plan, Chinese researchers say.

(Reporting by Zhou Xin and Benjamin Kang Lim; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)

another article

here is the interesting thing of note.

"China's proven uranium sources will last only 50 to 70 years, but this now changes to 3000 years," said the report.

As a nuclear fan boy this if true, is pretty good.

[Korgeta]

This is brilliant news if true, I do believe quite strongly in nuclear energy, given it's one of the few sources that should support the demand of a ever growing worldwide population and already this may be one of the things to come this year.

[PeZook]

This is great news since it means the Chinese actually care about preventing their country form becoming an unlivable wasteland. If they actually push for nukes as hard and as fast as they're planning, this means vast reductions both in pollution and carbon emission from one of the two biggest emitters of both.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Fantastic news. I wonder. If China are successful in this effort, could it encourage other nations to do the same?

[LaCroix]

Any idea what this technique is and what byproducts it produces? Usually, reprocessing leads to the problem of some extremely bad stuff having to be stored somewhere save for the next trillion years or so...

[Hamstray]

So, what's new about this particular method?
Fast reactor technology already provided a solution to the supply of fissile material issue over 25 years ago. The only problems are that uranium mining and nuclear waste deposit are much too cheap.

[Uncluttered]

Any idea what this technique is and what byproducts it produces? Usually, reprocessing leads to the problem of some extremely bad stuff having to be stored somewhere save for the next trillion years or so...

Usually the "Bad" stuff has shorter half lives, requiring storage for only a few hundred years if you separate it out.

[Chaotic Neutral]

Any idea what this technique is and what byproducts it produces? Usually, reprocessing leads to the problem of some extremely bad stuff having to be stored somewhere save for the next trillion years or so...

Reprocessing turns large amounts of nuclear waste that are very radioactive for a very long time and turns it into more nuclear fuel and a little bit of waste that is extremely radioactive for a hundred years or so.

[someone_else]

Fantastic news. I wonder. If China are successful in this effort, could it encourage other nations to do the same?

If they sell it at a good price (i.e. chinese enterprises design and/or build them) and lead by example, then yes, at least in Asia.

Unless the West gets all scared about nuclear proliferation, of course. But at that point the US will be on its knees anyway, so that may play in nuclear's favor.

I fear that nuclear in a totalitarian nation could lead to massive screwups (you know, corruption and massive cover-ups), or by the very least work exploitation and very little care for safety of the workers.
But I don't really know how it works in China.

[mr friendly guy]

I fear that nuclear in a totalitarian nation could lead to massive screwups (you know, corruption and massive cover-ups), or by the very least work exploitation and very little care for safety of the workers.
But I don't really know how it works in China.

Its quite a mix bag really. Their mining safety standards are shite, but they supposedly improving that, so thats something. They however have demonstrated an ability to churn out large products, from ships, super fast railways, Three Gorges Dam, lots of wind power etc with some reliability. Nuclear plants tend to fall into the second category of large products. IIRC for the first batch they plan to use old and proven designs. They are now working on the third or fourth generation (I lose track of which generation) nuclear power plants.

[fnord]

To provide a bit of background for the increase in fuel supply claimed in the OP's quote (as always, real nuclear engineers, please correct any cockups I've made):

1t U, enriched to 3.5% U-235 (per http://www.wise-uranium.org/nfcc.html) for use in a light water reactor, requires a shade over 8t natural U, containing ~57 kg U-235 (at 0.3% tails assay, Unat containing 0.711% U-235). 35 kg of that goes to the enriched fuel, and thus 22 kg goes to the tails.

After irradiation, (per p76 of http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publicatio ... 87_web.pdf ), 5% of the initial mass (or so, I'm using rough figures from multiple sources) are fission products - the ashes left over from the nuclear fire. In addition, 1% of the initial mass has been converted into various plutonium isotopes (two-thirds Pu239 and most of the rest Pu240), approx 0.1% are minor actinides (actinides other than U and Pu), leaving 93.9% of the original uranium, including 1% U-235.

tl;dr: only 5% of the initial fuel's mass has been "burned" without reprocessing.

Burning up the other 95% (via irradiation in appropriate reactors, etc) reduces the specific mined-uranium use by a factor of 20, turning China's 50-70 year uranium reserve into a 1000-1400 year reserve. The extra factor of 2-3 averred in the OP's quote I'm not anywhere near as sure about - at a guess, irradiating some of those tails left over from enrichment might fill the gap.