Available Reprocessing and Recycling Services for Research Reactor Spent Nuclear Fuel

Sandor Miklos Tozser, Pablo Adelfang, Ed Bradley, Madalina Budu and Mustapha Chiguer

International Journal for Nuclear Power, N5, 2015

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The international activities in the back-end management of RR (research reactor) nuclear fuel cycle have been dominated by the programmes of acceptance of RR SNF by the country where it was originally enriched. Two programmes were created under the Global Treat Reduction Initiative (GTRI) umbrella, for US-origin and Russian-origin fuel, and they had the major goal to eliminate the inventories of HEU (high enriched uranium) fresh and spent nuclear fuel stored at the RR sites worldwide. However, these programmes will soon have achieved their goals. When there are no more HEU inventories at RRs and no commerce in HEU for RRs, the primary driver for the take-back programmes will cease resulting in their phase out.