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Environment

Spent Nuclear Fuel Recycling Studied

November 7, 2005 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 83, Issue 45

A project to examine new approaches to reducing the nation's growing inventory of stored spent nuclear fuel is under way at the University of Wisconsin and the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory. The project will be based at the Center for Advanced Nuclear Fuel-Cycles, an initiative funded by the University of Chicago and housed at Argonne. Most spent nuclear fuel is now stored temporarily in secure pools at commercial reactors around the country or in leak-tight steel casks housed in aboveground concrete vaults. The fuel could end up at a planned commercial temporary storage facility in Utah or at the proposed Yucca Mountain high-level waste repository. But these storage options are short-term approaches to dealing with the backend of the nuclear fuel cycle, says Michael L. Corradini, a UW Madison professor of engineering physics and the center's codirector. “We hope to develop a ‘sustainable' fuel cycle-that is, an efficient, cost-effective way to reuse current spent nuclear fuel and minimize its by-products,” he says. “Advanced nuclear fuel cycles can be recycled as a source of available energy as demand for uranium increases.”

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