Nuclear fuel cycle and radioactive waste covers the facilities that supply and close the nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication plants, reprocessing facilities, interim spent fuel stores and geological disposal facilities.
The Capability Development Index tracks the events that move a capability — operational use, technical breakthroughs, procurement decisions and the industrial base behind them — and places each on the record with the date it happened.
Recent developments cover the current period. Historical developments are the inflection points that produced Nuclear Fuel Cycle & Radioactive Waste as it stands today.
The US Atomic Energy Act of 1946 contained a section defining uranium mill tailings, which became known in regulatory shorthand as 11(e)2 wastes. This gave the front end of the fuel cycle its first statutory waste category in American law.
From 1946 through 1993 thirteen states disposed of nuclear and radioactive waste at sea, with material sourced mainly from medical, research and nuclear industry activities. Ocean disposal was the dominant early answer to waste management before being closed off by international convention.
Japan entered a safeguard agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency providing for inspections. The commitment later proved imperfectly honoured, as reports of nuclear substances in facility waste were withheld from IAEA inspectors.
Carter prohibited transmutation in the United States out of concern that separating plutonium would aid weapons proliferation. The decision shaped American back-end policy towards once-through fuel use and direct disposal rather than closing the cycle.
According to a whistleblower, a manager at the Italian state energy research agency Enea paid a clan to remove 600 drums of toxic and radioactive waste from several European states and the United States, buried in Somalia after local politicians were bought off. Shipments continued into the 1990s, with some loads scuttled off the Calabrian coast.
Reagan reversed Carter's prohibition, reopening the legal path for transmutation and reprocessing research in the United States. The policy reversal illustrates how fuel cycle closure in the US has been governed by executive discretion rather than settled law.
A review of the Swedish radioactive waste disposal programme found the country's estimate of several hundred thousand years, perhaps up to one million, to be fully justified for waste isolation. The finding helped establish the very long timescales now standard in geological repository design.
The ICRP suggested a dose standard in 1990 that became the reference point for national repository rules. European limits were subsequently set far more stringently than the ICRP figure, and more stringent still than the US EPA's proposed Yucca Mountain standard.
The Protocol to the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter redefined dumping and tightened the regime governing disposal at sea. It consolidated the end of ocean disposal of radioactive waste as a legitimate national option.
GNEP committed the United States to research on transmutation technologies to reduce the nuclear waste burden. The programme aimed to process used fuel so that it reached the radiotoxicity of natural uranium ore in about 300 years rather than 100,000.
Afghan officials alleged that Pakistan had dumped nuclear waste in the south of the country during the Taliban period of 1996 to 2001. The accusation highlighted the absence of any enforceable regional framework for radioactive waste transfer.
The JRC published findings on radioactive waste disposal that fed into European assessments of nuclear power's sustainability. Its conclusions carried weight in EU-level regulatory debate on the back end of the fuel cycle.
Finland reached an advanced stage of building the Onkalo repository at 400 to 450 metres depth, planned to open in 2025. As of 2019 no dedicated civilian high-level waste site was operational anywhere, making Onkalo the first of its kind; France, Canada, Sweden and South Korea were at earlier planning stages.
The Nobel physics laureate suggested using high-energy, short-duration laser pulses to accelerate deuterons into a tritium target for fast neutrons, or protons for neutron spallation. Either route was intended to transmute long-lived nuclear waste.
A series of tests was conducted in November 2018 and repeated publicly in January 2019 for a concept involving drilling over a kilometre vertically and two kilometres horizontally into the crust. The approach is proposed as an alternative to mined geological repositories for spent fuel and separated caesium and strontium.
Work started in Australia on a plant using the Synroc ceramic immobilisation process for radioactive waste. Synroc offers an alternative to borosilicate glass as a durable host matrix for long-lived waste forms.
The NDA set out progress on approaches to managing the UK's stockpile of separated plutonium, summarising work shared with government. The paper addressed the unresolved question of whether the material is a resource for MOX fuel or a waste requiring disposal.
The council turned down central government plans to begin work on a deep storage facility near the Lake District National Park. The veto set back Britain's geological disposal programme and demonstrated the weight of local consent in siting decisions.
Fujimura acknowledged that nuclear substances were present in the waste of Japanese nuclear facilities and that the reports had been kept secret from IAEA inspectors. The admission undercut confidence in national waste reporting under the safeguards regime.
After talks that included a visit by US Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman in September 2010 and trilateral discussions in Washington in February 2011, Mongolia ended all negotiations following serious domestic opposition. The episode showed the political limits of siting international waste facilities in a third country.
During a draining operation at the Tricastin plant, liquid containing untreated uranium overflowed a faulty tank and some 75 kg of radioactive material seeped into the ground and two nearby rivers. In a separate incident over 100 staff were contaminated with low doses of radiation.