Recycling of Used Nuclear Fuels - An Interesting Theory

Courtesy of @moosey , originally posted on the charts thread, but I think it deserves its own.


Well BBO, my theory goes something like this.
Did anyone here ever wonder why GLE was chosen to clean up the tails to recover U235? Why us why not Centrus? or other Enrichers for that matter?

I also believe that the US liked this address mentioned below very much and they saw the benefits of further developing this technology?
" Advanced Technology for Nuclear Energy Prepared Testimony by Eric. P. Loewen Ph.D Chief Consulting Engineer, Advanced Plants, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy Americas LLC. Before the Subcommittee of Energy and Water Development Committee of Appropriations US Senate"

In this address he indicated that the US didn't need one more ounce of Uranium, they already had enough to last some 900 years, it is in the form of Used Nuclear Fuel.

I personally believe all of this is connected to the latest developments for the Natrium reactor, to me it certainly looks as if they will use recycled UNF, perhaps not in the US initially Zog but certainly at other O/S locations?

I believe GEH have the means to recover the Plutonium and Uranium from UNF, the way they speak it is a much better method using the electrochemical dry processing process than existing methods today that use a wet process, so they will recover two components required for a MOX fuel, but there is a third component required, well two really, U238 (depleted Uranium and HALEU) we know that Centrus has been offered 25% of the commercial market for HALEU and they will be providing the first loads for Natrium.

But lets consider the other component "U238", there will be a mountain of it available left over from the tails U235 recovery, but I do believe there is a problem, but possibly one that may have been solved by virtue of using the laser enrichment process or laser transmutation perhaps?

The problem revolves around impurities remaining in U238 which over time causes reactions within the depleted Uranium that causes heat buildup, as an aside I find it interesting that 40% of the heat beneath the earths crust is caused by this same effect of the U238 having impurities causing a heat build up?

If they can remove most if not all impurities then this heat build up doesn't occur, Charles Forsberg from the MIT wrote an article about advances in laser technology.

The use of Lasers can do this either laser enrichment or laser transmutation perhaps, but centrifuge technology would be pretty much useless, this in my opinion is why Centrus didn't get the nod for thePaducah tails recovery of U235

Another reason why I believe the DOE were part of this decision is that they were prepared to build a purpose built area to store this recovered U238, the DOE was prepared to spend US$324 million, this information came from a Timetric CIC document that I came by, some said it was useless, but that fact alone means something? why not leave it under the stars as they do today in dry storage cannisters, the reason is that it is simply worth a lot more once it has been treated by GLE than it was before I reckon and needs to be stored perhaps under a conditioned enviroment?

Here is some more information that might help?
https://www.intechopen.com/books/nu...ve-method-for-nuclear-fuel-proliferation-prot

1. Introduction

The paper addresses to the problems related with protection of the existing and advanced nuclear fuel types against unauthorized proliferation via introduction of some admixtures into their composition. So, the task may be defined as follows: these admixtures must create the barriers difficult to overcome for the use of nuclear fuels in nuclear explosive devices (NED) but, at the same time, these admixtures must preserve (or even enhance) energy potential of nuclear fuels for further peaceful use at civilian nuclear power plants (NPP). Such an approach to proliferation protection of nuclear fuels is often called as an isotopic denaturing. The term “isotopic denaturing” is used to designate any artificial changes in isotopic composition of chemical element which can give some new desirable properties to this element.

This is probably a similar method that the Natrium fuel uses?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium
Natural uranium metal contains about 0.71% U-235, 99.28% U-238, and about 0.0054% U-234. The production of enriched uranium using isotope separation creates depleted uranium containing only 0.2% to 0.4% U-235. Because natural uranium begins with such a low percentage of U-235, enrichment produces large quantities of depleted uranium. For example, producing 1 kg of 5% enriched uranium requires 11.8 kg of natural uranium, and leaves about 10.8 kg of depleted uranium having only 0.3% U-235.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) defines depleted uranium as uranium with a percentage of the 235U isotope that is less than 0.711% by weight (see 10 CFR 40.4). The military specifications designate that the DU used by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) contain less than 0.3% 235U.[19] In actuality, DoD uses only DU that contains approximately 0.2% 235U.[19]

Why would that be? I believe that it relates to storage of DU and heat build up?

That is my conspiracy theory in a nutshell.