International Panel on Fissile Materials Plutonium Separation in Nuclear Power Programs Status, Problems, and Prospects of Civilian Reprocessing Around the World International Panel on Fissile Materials Plutonium Separation in Nuclear Power Programs Status, Problems, and Prospects of Civilian Reprocessing Around the World 2015 International Panel on Fissile Materials This version of the report has been revised on 1 September 2015 correcting the endnote numbering and updating a few web links. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License To view a copy of this license, visit www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0 On the cover: the map shows existing plutonium separation (reprocessing) facilities around the world. See Figure 1.5 of this report for more detail Table of Contents About the IPFM 1 Summary 2 1 Introduction 5 Country Studies 2 China 19 3 France 30 4 Germany 44 5 India 52 6 Japan 62 7 South Korea 73 8 Russia 80 9 United Kingdom 90 Technical Background 10 Transmutation 102 11 Economics 112 12 Radiological Risk 125 Endnotes 137 Contributors 179 Tables 1.1 Past and current civilian reprocessing plants 14 2.1 Spent fuel stored at China’s nuclear power plants 20 2.2 China’s proposed breeder reactor development schedule, 2010 24 2.3 China’s uranium requirements, production capacity and imports 25 3.1 Fuel loaded and unloaded in French nuclear power plants, 2008 – 2013 35 3.2 Projections of France’s spent fuel inventories, 2020 & 2030 36 6.1 Plutonium in MOX fuel shipments from Europe to Japan 64 6.2 Spent fuel stored and available capacity at Japan’s nuclear plants, 2014 69 7.1 Spent fuel and storage capacities at South Korea’s nuclear plants, 2013 73 8.1 Estimated stocks of spent power-reactor fuel in Russia, 2013 82 8.2 Timeline of Soviet/Russian fast breeder reactor program 83 8.3 Rosatom’s projects for the fabrication of plutonium fuels 86 8.4 Rosatom’s reprocessing projects 87 10.1 Long-lived transuranics in spent light water reactor fuel 102 11.1 Costs of once-through and twice-through fuel cycles in selected studies 114 11.2 Reprocessing and MOX fuel fabrication costs 116 Figures 1.1 The key steps in a basic reprocessing plant 6 1.2 Average uranium prices paid by U.S. nuclear utilities, 1965 – 2013 9 1.3 Escalation of estimated reprocessing costs, 1960 – 1990 10 1.4 Growth of stocks of separated civilian plutonium, 1996 – 2013 12 1.5 Civilian nuclear reprocessing plants around the world 16 2.1 Macstor-400 dry cask spent fuel storage at Qinshan III NPP 21 2.2 Cumulative additional demand for spent fuel storage in China till 2040 21 2.3 Jiuquan nuclear reprocessing complex 22 3.1 Radioactive-waste streams generated by France’s nuclear industry 33 3.2 LWR Reprocessing at La Hague, 1976 – 2013 33 3.3 Stocks of unirradiated plutonium in France, 1996 – 2013 37 3.4 Scenario for France’s plutonium disposal capacity 42 4.1 Amusement park at Germany’s abandoned SNR-300 breeder reactor 48 4.2 Dry-cask spent fuel storage at Neckarwestheim nuclear plant 49 5.1 Locations of India’s reprocessing plants 53 5.2 India’s stockpile of separated reactor-grade plutonium, 1988 – 2014 58 5.3 Scenario for India’s plutonium stock with six FBRs, 2015 – 2025 59 6.1 Japan’s stockpile of separated plutonium, 1993 – 2025 65 6.2 Japan’s Rokkasho reprocessing plant 67 7.1 Dry spent fuel storage at South Korea’s Wolsong nuclear plant, 2014 74 7.2 Surface facilities at Finland’s planned Onkalo repository, 2010 77 8.1 Cross-section of the BN-800 fast neutron reactor 84 8.2 Locations of Russia’s nuclear facilities 88 9.1 Separated plutonium stockpile in the United Kingdom, 1995 – 2013 95 9.2 The Sellafield site in the United Kingdom, 2008 98 10.1 Ingestion toxicity of spent fuel in a repository in perspective 103 10.2 Fission probabilities for slow and fast neutrons 104 11.1 Costs of reprocessing plus MOX fuel fabrication 116 11.2 Age distribution of global nuclear capacity in late 2014 122 12.1 Strontium-90 contamination from 1957 explosion in Kyshtym 128 12.2 After the 1993 process tank explosion at the Tomsk reprocessing plant 129 12.3 Clusters of dense-packed spent fuel in La Hague pool, 2012 134 8 Plutonium separation in nuclear power programs About the IPFM The International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM) was founded in January 2006. It is an independent group of arms-control and nonproliferation experts from eighteen countries, including both nuclear weapon and non-nuclear weapon states. The mission of the IPFM is to develop the technical basis for practical and achievable policy initiatives to secure, consolidate, and reduce stockpiles of highly enriched urani- um and plutonium. These fissile materials are the key ingredients in nuclear weapons, and their control is critical to nuclear disarmament, halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and ensuring that terrorists do not acquire nuclear weapons. Both military and civilian stocks of fissile materials have to be addressed. The nuclear weapon states still have enough fissile materials in their weapon and naval fuel stock- piles for tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. On the civilian side, enough plutonium has been separated to make a similarly large number of weapons. Highly enriched uranium is used in civilian reactor fuel in more than one hundred locations. The total amount used for this purpose is sufficient to make hundreds of Hiroshima-type bombs, a design potentially within the capabilities of terrorist groups. The panel is co-chaired by Alexander Glaser and Zia Mian of Princeton University and Tatsujiro Suzuki of Nagasaki University, Japan. Its 29 members include nuclear experts from Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Short biographies of the panel members can be found on the IPFM website, www.fissilematerials.org. IPFM research and reports are shared with international organizations, national gov- ernments and nongovernmental groups. The reports are available on the IPFM website and through the IPFM blog, www.fissilematerials.org/blog. Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security provides administrative and research support for the IPFM. IPFM is supported by grants to Princeton University from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Plutonium separation in nuclear power programs 1 Summary Plutonium was first separated by the United States during the Second World War. Ura- nium was loaded into nuclear reactors, irradiated, cooled, and then chemically “repro- cessed” in another facility to recover the plutonium. The reactors and the reprocessing plant were built as part of the secret atomic bomb project. Since then, eight other countries also have produced and separated plutonium for weapons. Starting in the 1960s, some of the nuclear-weapon states and a few non-weapon states started to separate plutonium for civilian use from spent fuel produced by power reac- tors. The United States ended its civilian reprocessing program in 1972 and the nuclear- weapon states that are parties to the NPT ended their military reprocessing activities with the end of the Cold War. Today there are only a handful of countries with ac- tive civilian reprocessing programs: China, France, India, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom. This report looks at the history, current status and prospects of these programs. It also looks at the rise and fall of reprocessing in Germany and the agitation in South Korea for starting a program. There are also three technical chapters at the end assessing: the utility of reprocessing for managing spent nuclear fuel; the economics of reprocessing and plutonium use; and the radiological risk from reprocessing plants. The original objective of civilian reprocessing was to provide startup fuel for planned “breeder” reactors that would produce more plutonium than they consumed. These plutonium breeder reactors would be much more efficient at utilizing uranium and, throughout the 1960s, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission promoted them as the so- lution to concerns that nuclear power would be limited by the availability of low-cost uranium. Large-scale construction of breeder reactors was expected to begin in the 1990s. In 1974, India, which had acquired reprocessing technology — ostensibly for a breeder reactor program — conducted a “peaceful” nuclear explosion that utilized plutonium produced in a reactor supplied with U.S. heavy water. The U.S. government realized that civilian reprocessing was facilitating nuclear-weapon proliferation and reversed its position on breeder reactors, concluding within a few years that they were unnecessary and uneconomic. This judgment was borne out during the 1980s and 1990s by experiences with “demon- stration” breeder reactors in France, Germany, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom. The reactors were found to be both more costly than conventional reactors and less reliable, with most operating only a small fraction of the time. Only India and Russia have continued with demonstration breeder reactor programs. Reprocessing continued in France, Japan and the United Kingdom, however, and China built a pilot reprocess- ing plant that operated briefly in 2010. In the meantime, much more low-cost uranium was discovered and global nuclear capac- ity plateaued after the 1986 Chernobyl accident. Uranium only contributes about 2 per- cent to the cost of electricity from a new nuclear power plant and there is no economic incentive to move to costly breeder reactors, even if they are more uranium-efficient. 2 Plutonium separation in nuclear power programs France proposed the use of plutonium as supplementary fuel for conventional water- cooled power reactors.