DOE puts GNEP reports online 
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has released detailed reports and presentations developed by four industry consortia that provide industry perspectives on closing the nuclear fuel cycle in the US.
The reports and presentations were submitted by EnergySolutions; General Atomics; General Electric-Hitachi; and the International Nuclear Recycling Alliance, led by AREVA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The reports describe conceptual designs, including cost and schedule for an initial nuclear fuel recycling center and advanced recycling reactor.
There is an enormous amount of material including the presentations and full reports. It might take as many nuclear engineers to read the reports as it took to prepare them.
That said anyone interested in a public look, that is without proprietary constraints, at what might be involved in the U.S. in closing the nuclear fuel cycle would benefit from at least paging through the briefings if not the full text of the materials.
Background and Future Work
In May 2007, DOE issued a Funding Opportunity Announcement for studies, providing financial assistance to selected applicants to perform the analyses.
The four industry teams executed cooperative agreements with DOE. They have obtained funding through September 2008. There is a possibility of continued funding through September 2009, to develop conceptual designs, technology development roadmaps, and business plans for potential commercialization of nuclear fuel recycling and related reactor technologies.
On the Net
GNEP nuclear fuel reports
2 comments:
Although presented as "closing" the fuel cycle, reprocessing actually opens it in a big way. Fuel is ruptured and radioactive gas released, massive volumes of high-level waste are generated, vast quantities contaminated uranium which essentially are not reused are stockpiled, and in most countries which reprocess even the plutonium isn't reused. What's closed about that? In the UK, 0% of the reprocessed uranium and 0% of the separated plutonium is reused. Sounds pretty "open" to me. Let's get our terminology straight.
There's so much plutonium and highly enriched uranium from decommissioned nuclear weapons right now that these folks don't need to dig into the reprocessed stuff yet.
See http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2008/05/areva-signs-27b-construction-contract.html#links
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