page_title: Nuclear power
section_title: Reprocessing
hierarchical_section_title: Nuclear power / Life cycle of nuclear fuel / Reprocessing
caption_attribution_description: English: Integral Fast Reactor: concept
context_page_description: Nuclear power is the use of nuclear reactions that release nuclear energy to generate heat, which most frequently is then used in steam turbines to produce electricity in a nuclear power plant. Nuclear power can be obtained from nuclear fission, nuclear decay and nuclear fusion reactions. Presently, the vast majority of electricity from nuclear power is produced by nuclear fission of uranium and plutonium. Nuclear decay processes are used in niche applications such as radioisotope thermoelectric generators. Generating electricity from fusion power remains at the focus of international research.
  Civilian nuclear power supplied 2,563 terawatt hours of electricity in 2018, equivalent to about 10% of global electricity generation, and was the second largest low-carbon power source after hydroelectricity. As of December 2019, there are 443 civilian fission reactors in the world, with a combined electrical capacity of 395 gigawatt. There are also 56 nuclear power reactors under construction and 109 reactors planned, with a combined capacity of 60 GW and 120 GW, respectively.
context_section_description: Most thermal reactors run on a once-through fuel cycle, mainly due to the low price of fresh uranium, though many reactors are also fueled with recycled fissionable materials that remain in spent nuclear fuel.  The most common fissionable material that is recycled is the reactor-grade plutonium (RGPu) that is extracted from spent fuel, it is mixed with uranium oxide and fabricated into mixed-oxide or MOX fuel. The first LWR designs certified to operate on a full core of MOX fuel, the ABWR and the System 80, began to appear in the 1990s. The potential for recycling the spent fuel a second time is limited by undesirable neutron economy issues using second-generation MOX fuel in thermal-reactors.  These issues do not affect fast reactors, which are therefore preferred in order to achieve the full energy potential of the original uranium. The only commercial demonstration of twice recycled, high burnup fuel to date, occurred in the Phénix fast reactor.
  Because thermal LWRs remain the most common reactor worldwide, the most typical form of commercial spent fuel recycling is to recycle the plutonium a single time as MOX fuel, as is done in France, where it is considered to increase the sustainability of the nuclear fuel cycle, reduce the attractiveness of spent fuel to theft and lower the volume of high level nuclear waste. Reprocessing of civilian fuel from power reactors is also currently done in the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan, and India.
  The main constituent of spent fuel from the most common light water reactor, is uranium that is slightly more enriched than natural uranium, which can be recycled, though there is a lower incentive to do so. Most of this "recovered uranium", or at times referred to as reprocessed uranium, remains in storage. It can however be used in a fast reactor, used directly as fuel in CANDU reactors, or re-enriched for another cycle through an LWR. The direct use of recovered uranium to fuel a CANDU reactor was first demonstrated at Quishan, China. The first re-enriched uranium reload to fuel a commercial LWR, occurred in 1994 at the Cruas unit 4, France. Re-enriching of reprocessed uranium is common in France and Russia. When reprocessed uranium, namely Uranium-236, is part of the fuel of LWRs, it generates a spent fuel and plutonium isotope stream with greater inherent self-protection, than the once-thru fuel cycle.
  While reprocessing offers the potential recovery of up to 95% of the remaining uranium and plutonium fuel, in spent nuclear fuel and a reduction in long term radioactivity within the remaining waste. Reprocessing has been politically controversial because of the potential to contribute to nuclear proliferation and varied perceptions of increasing the vulnerability to nuclear terrorism and because of its higher fuel cost, compared to the once-through fuel cycle. Similarly, while reprocessing reduces the volume of high-level waste, it does not reduce the fission products that are the primary residual heat generating and radioactive substances for the first few centuries outside the reactor, thus still requiring an almost identical container-spacing for the initial first few hundred years, within proposed geological waste isolation facilities. However much of the opposition to the Yucca Mountain project and those similar to it, primarily center not around fission products but the "plutonium mine" concern that  placed in the underground, un-reprocessed spent fuel, will eventually become.
  In the United States, spent nuclear fuel is currently not reprocessed. A major recommendation of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future was that "the United States should undertake...one or more permanent deep geological facilities for the safe disposal of spent fuel and high-level nuclear waste".
  The French La Hague reprocessing facility has operated commercially since 1976 and is responsible for half the world's reprocessing as of 2010. Having produced MOX fuel from spent fuel derived from France, Japan, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands, with the non-recycl
caption: The most developed, though commercially unfielded, alternative reprocessing method, is Pyroprocessing,[224] suggested as part of the depicted metallic-fueled, Integral fast reactor (IFR) a sodium fast reactor concept of the 1990s.  After the spent fuel is dissolved in molten salt, all of the recyclable actinides, consisting largely of plutonium and uranium though with important minor constituents, are extracted using electrorefining/electrowinning.  The resulting mixture keeps the plutonium at all times in an unseparated gamma and alpha emitting actinide form, that is also mildly self-protecting in theft scenarios.[225]
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