Reducing spent nuclear fuel

A group of scientists as students are developing nuclear fuel cycles that will recycle and dispose of North America’s growing inventory of high-level radioactive material.

The group - formed from scientists and students from Big Ten universities, the University of Chicago and the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory - will base its studies in the Center for Advanced Nuclear Fuel-Cycles (CANF), a new initiative housed at Argonne. Co-directors at Argonne and the University of Wisconsin-Madison will lead the centre.

Nuclear fuel used in current reactors has enormous available energy. As the fuel is used to produce electricity, only a fraction of this available energy is consumed, generating a small quantity of high-level radioactive waste within the solid fuel.

Currently, most spent nuclear fuel is stored temporarily in secure, specially designed pools at commercial reactors around the country, or in leak-tight steel casks housed in above-ground concrete vaults. When space is full, the fuel could end up at a commercial temporary-storage facility in Utah, or perhaps at the proposed Yucca Mountain high-level waste repository.