ABSTRACT
Most of the world’s reactors currently in service are light-water reactors operating on the once-through cycle. The spent fuel taken from the reactor is stored in ponds, and there are no active plans to reprocess the fuel and chemically separate the remaining uranium from the fission products (2%) and plutonium (1%). Some countries, however, have taken the view that for environmental and waste-management reasons, for economic reasons, or for resource-conservation reasons, they should reprocess spent fuel; and the U.K. and France, in particular, have developed reprocessing to a full-scale commercial operation. In the first instance this was necessary because of the possible corrosion of spent Magnox fuel, which therefore could not be stored in ponds for long periods. There has also been some uncertainty about long-term storage of other gascooled reactor fuel (from AGRs), but there is less concern about the storage characteristics of water-reactor fuels, and dry-storage techniques, if economic, could reduce the technical problem.
