Brent Dixon

Dynamic Systems Analysis Report for Nuclear Fuel Recycle

This report examines the time-dependent dynamics of transitioning from the current United States (U.S.) nuclear fuel cycle where used nuclear fuel is disposed in a repository to a closed fuel cycle where the used fuel is recycled and only fission products and waste are disposed. The report is intended to help inform policy developers, decision makers, and program managers of system-level options and constraints as they guide the formulation and implementation of advanced fuel cycle development and demonstration efforts and move toward deployment of nuclear fuel recycling infrastructure.

Dynamic Simulations of Advanced Fuel Cycles

Abstract Nothing in life is static, so why compare fuel cycle options using only static, equilibrium analyses? Competitive industry looks at how new technology options might displace existing technologies and change how existing systems work. So too, our years of performing dynamic simulations of advanced nuclear fuel cycle options provide insights into how they might work and how one might transition from the current once-through fuel cycle. This paper summarizes those insights within the context of the 2005 objectives and goals of what was then the U.S. Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative (AFCI). The intent here is not to compare options, assess options versus those objectives and goals, nor recommend changes to those objectives and goals. (The specific options change over time; the objective in this paper is to look for more generic insights.) We organize what we have learned from dynamic simulations in the context of the AFCI objectives for waste management, proliferation resistance, uranium utilization, and economics. Thus, we do not merely describe “lessons learned” from dynamic simulations but attempt to answer the “so what” question by using this context; i.e., how do the lessons learned matter relative to goals and objectives not just to technological observations? The analyses have been performed using the Verifiable Fuel Cycle Simulation of Nuclear Fuel Cycle Dynamics (VISION). We observe that the 2005 objectives and goals do not address many of the inherently dynamic discriminators among advanced fuel cycle options and transitions thereof.

Environmental Impacts, Health and Safety Impacts, and Financial Costs of the Front End of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle

FEFC processes, unlike many of the proposed fuel cycles and technologies under consideration, involve mature operational processes presently in use at a number of facilities worldwide. This report identifies significant impacts resulting from these current FEFC processes and activities. Impacts considered to be significant are those that may be helpful in differentiating between fuel cycle performance and for which the FEFC impact is not negligible relative to those from the remainder of the full fuel cycle. This report: • Defines ‘representative’ processes that typify impacts associated with each step of the FEFC, • Establishes a framework and architecture for rolling up impacts into normalized measures that can be scaled to quantify their contribution to the total impacts associated with various fuel cycles, and • Develops and documents the bases for estimates of the impacts and costs associated with each of the representative FEFC processes.

Economic Analysis of Complex Nuclear Fuel Cycles with NE-COST

Abstract The purpose of this work is to present a new methodology and the associated computational tools developed within the U.S. Department of Energy Fuel Cycle Options Campaign to quantify the economic performance of complex nuclear fuel cycles. The levelized electricity cost at the busbar is generally chosen to quantify and compare the economic performance of different base load—generating technologies, including nuclear; the levelized electricity cost is the cost that renders the risk-adjusted discounted net present value of the investment cash flow equal to zero. The work presented here is focused on the calculation of the levelized cost of electricity of fuel cycles at mass balance equilibrium, which is termed levelized cost of electricity at equilibrium (LCAE). To alleviate the computational issues associated with the calculation of the LCAE for complex fuel cycles, a novel approach has been developed. This approach has been termed the island approach because of its logical structure, in which a generic complex fuel cycle is subdivided into subsets of fuel cycle facilities called islands, each containing one and only one type of reactor or blanket and an arbitrary number of fuel cycle facilities. A nuclear economic software tool, NE-COST, written in the commercial programming software MATLAB©, has been developed to calculate the LCAE of complex fuel cycles with the island computational approach. NE-COST has also been developed with the capability to handle uncertainty: the input parameters (both unit costs and fuel cycle characteristics) can have uncertainty distributions associated with them, and the output can be computed in terms of probability density functions of the LCAE. In this paper, NE-COST will be used to quantify, as examples, the economic performance of (a) once-through systems of current light water reactors (LWRs), (b) continuous plutonium recycling in fast reactors (FRs) with drivers and blankets, and (c) recycling of plutonium bred in FRs into LWRs. For each fuel cycle, the contributions to the total LCAE of the main cost components will be identified.