Potential for Korea, Japan, U.S. to Collaborate on Pyroprocessing Under Trump
South Korea (ROK), Japan and the United States all have large nuclear energy programs that are facing a variety of challenges limiting their growth, namely opposition by the nonproliferation industry to wider deployment of enrichment and recycling technologies. There is interest and opportunity to collaborate in developing solutions in areas where challenges overlap.
The Global America Business Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank, recently hosted a forum that gathered high level representatives from all three countries as speakers to an audience made up of people from government, media, industry, non-profit groups and antinuclear organizations to discuss some of the challenges and solutions.
Several speakers, including Dr. Jooho Whang from the Korean Nuclear Society, Mr. Nobuo Tanaka from the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, and Dr. John-hyuk Baek from the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute focused on pyroprocessing.
They described it as a field where all three nations could both contribute to and benefit from developing laboratory-tested technology into a more commercial product offering.
Photo Credit: INL 2009
Pyroprocessing is a high temperature material recycling technology that was developed in the U.S. as part of the long ago discontinued Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) program. One driver for its development was to create a way to extract and reuse mixed actinides from used reactor fuel without passing through any stages that produce separated fissile isotopes.
As envisioned, pyroprocessing would also enable material from used fuel rods to be promptly transformed into new fuel rods, thus addressing the contentious issue of building up large stockpiles of material that could be converted into nuclear weapons.
Even though it was developed with attention to limiting its use as a potential source of weapons-useful material, pyroprocessing is still tightly controlled under export control regimes. It is often a major discussion topic during the negotiations for bilateral cooperation agreements with the U.S.
A contingent of the American nonproliferation community stubbornly resists any development that might lead to a closed fuel cycle, ostensibly due to concerns about either material or useful knowledge development.
Dr. Ed Lyman from the Union of Concerned Scientists attended the meeting and expressed that point of view by asking a question, muttering to himself and exuding negative body language.
Nuclear cooperation agreements with the U.S., known as 123 agreements after the governing section in the Atomic Energy Act, specify terms and conditions for nuclear technology and information cooperation.
Each agreement is individually concluded and some contain specific prohibitions on various components of the nuclear fuel cycle.
ROK has been interested in pyroprocessing for a number of years, recognizing that it has potential to make long term used fuel storage easier. The country’s indigenous development effort, however, has been confined to laboratory scale studies due to the limitations imposed by the original 123 agreement that it signed in 1974.
That first agreement expired in 2014. The new ROK-U.S. 123 agreement was signed in the summer of 2015 after an extended period of negotiation.
One reason for the extended discussions was that Korea insisted that it needed more flexible options for dealing with used fuel. At the same time, some U.S. negotiators were interested in adding conditions prohibiting both fuel enrichment and recycling.
The final agreement finessed the issue; it does not mention enrichment and recycling. Instead, the preamble to the agreement explicitly affirms that nonproliferation treaty signatories like ROK have an inalienable right to develop peaceful applications of nuclear energy.
The current agreement is also more balanced that the 1974 version, recognizing that Seoul has matured into a capable nuclear system supplier in its own right. It is no longer a subservient customer of a world dominating supplier.
As Dr. Whang described, the ROK and the U.S. have long been cooperating on pyroprocessing development and testing.
Korea produced a plan in 2008 that envisions a pilot-scale sodium fast reactor using fuel materials extracted from used light water fuel by 2028. In support of that goal, the plan envisions a pyroprocessing facility in operation by 2025.
In 2011, the two countries signed a ten-year agreement to continue the cooperation, with a completion goal in 2020 that fits well with the ROK’s existing facility construction dates.
A later speaker, Mr. Tanaka from Sasakawa Peace Foundation, suggested that Japan might be interested in joining the U.S. and Korea in developing pyroprocessing technology.
He mentioned that his country has recently decided to permanently shut down its Monju facility. That is the only currently operating sodium fast reactor in the country. However, Mr. Tanaka described that decision as a positive step that allows more options for closing the nuclear fuel cycle.
He suggested it is time for increased U.S.-Japan-Korea cooperation as Japan reduces its commitment to joint projects with France, especially those related to aqueous reprocessing.
Japan’s current 123 agreement with the U.S. explicitly allows both enrichment and recycling, but Tanaka warned that there are “antinuclear people” from Japan that are already working in Washington to prevent the automatic extension of the agreement when it expires in 2018.
He described the French aqueous reprocessing technology currently used as being more expensive than pyroprocessing. It is also unpopular due to the growing stockpile of separated plutonium.
Tanaka mentioned a visit to the Idaho National Laboratory where he toured the hot cells and other components that were developed for the IFR project. He saw that there was real equipment that had been fully tested at a laboratory scale and was ready for further refinement and development.
In addition to addressing the used fuel challenge that Japan shares with the ROK (and the U.S.) pyroprocessing has potential uses associated with the cleanup and eventual removal of melted fuel at Fukushima Daiichi.
By sectioning solidified corium into appropriately sized blocks, it is technically feasible to reduce the oxide material into metal and then to use electrorefining to separate the actinides from fission products.
Yoon Chang, a key member of the IFR team who remains active in international technology development efforts, confirmed the feasibility of the concept and pointed out a study titled “Conceptual Design of a Pilot-Scale Pyroprocessing Facility” performed in 2015 for Argonne National Laboratory.
Both Korean and Japanese speakers mentioned their interest in jointly pursuing a project that might lead to commercial demonstration of the GE-developed PRISM sodium fast reactor.
That design incorporates lessons learned from the IFR project and once passed through an initial design validation review at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
There are political reasons for optimism regarding increased cooperation and trade opportunities for technologies like pyroprocessing and Gen IV sodium fast reactors.
Rex Tillerson, the Trump administration’s nominee for secretary of state, a department that would play a key role in related deci- sion processes, recognizes that sanctions and technology trade restrictions can harm U.S. interests without effectively altering the behavior of the target of those restrictions.
Ran across an Ian Scott You-Tube the other day:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMID8SsyMV8&ab_channel=ThoriumEnergy
Scott is a principal at Moltex Energy: http://www.moltexenergy.com/ — they are developing a “stable-salt” MSR. Scott observes the principle difference between applying pyroprocessing to metal-fuel SFRs where the technique was originally pioneered, and U-Pu fueled MSR, is that pyroprocessing should in principle be much simpler with the latter.
All advocates of MSRs have been banging on about the cost savings that reprocessing straight from a salt fuel would bring, as cuts out the initial steps .
If can be done cheaply enough, perhaps why bother with the online processing?
I like the moltex ideas. Wonder if they need online removal of Cs from coolant salt which would get there via Xe. Half lives of 133 135 and 137 Xe are 5.5d, 9.5h and 3.8 min so quite a bit would come out due to open venting af the fuel tubes.
My question is answered in the fission gases section here:
http://www.moltexenergy.com/learnmore/
Reprocessing might be easier for the fuel salt, but the table on the first page here
http://www.moltexenergy.com/learnmore/Moltex_Gaseous.pdf
is rather sobering. Starting with 20% U (presumable repu) and 20% reactor grade Pu (hence 12% fissile) and fissioning 5% they end um with 15% Pu 18.5% U and 1.5% m.a. (not sure how they get 1.13% Np). So for 5 percentage point fissions they loose about 3 percentage points fissile material and even with perfect reprocessing, they would only get 1.6 fissions out of each fissile input nucleus. This is a rather greedy burner and not a breeder. Not much better than a LWR, in fact.
From a fast reactor, we should expect much better. It appears the neutron economy with salts is just not good enough.
Note also how transatomic power in their latest white paper went from the original claim of running on a LWR waste actinide mix with 1.8% fissile content to running on nice and tasty 5% enriched uranium, and benefitting from topping up with 20% enriched uranium. Given they, unlike Moltex, use Litium in the salt, the claim of significant fast fission in some unmoderated regions was never credible. Litium itself is too much of a moderator.
All this highlights the huge importance of the work that was done on the IFR, which really does allow breeding.
Pyroprocessing is the most important nuclear technology now, even more important than advanced reactors, because most of the advanced reactors depend on reprocessing in one way or another. Aqueous reprocessing has reached its limits and can’t be considered as a stage in any realistic attempt at closing the fuel cycle. Pyroprocessing holds promise for becoming one of the pillars of the plutonium economy.
Could you please explain a bit more why aqueous reprocessing has reached its limits?
Aqueous reprocessing generates large amounts of low-activity water, which has to be dumped somewhere. While I can agree that it doesn’t pose any immediate danger, it raises questions about the scalability of the technology. It also creates bad public image of reprocessing as something inevitably polluting. Closed fuel cycle implies that the fuel has to be reprocessed many times in a short time span. If doing so produces any significant enviromental impact it sort of defies the point of closing the cycle. We better have a repocessing technology that keeps all the waste in the system. Luckily, we have pyroprocessing.
Rod Adams wrote:
As envisioned, pyroprocessing would also enable material from used fuel rods to be promptly transformed into new fuel rods, thus addressing the contentious issue of building up large stockpiles of material that could be converted into nuclear weapons.
Two things:
1. The two outputs of pyroprocessing are mixed actinides, and everything else (fission products, mainly). The mixed actinides are not bomb making material. In theory, bomb grade material could be separated out, but there are easier ways of making a bomb.
2. Where would the mixed actinides be used? Recycling LWR fuel would yield a lot of U238 in the mix. This mix would be useful to dilute highly enriched uranium from decommissioned weapons, but there is not that much of this stuff around. We need reactors (such as the IFR) that can use the mix as the main input to replace the fuel burned by the reactor.
Indeed. Factor in the depleted uranium-238 left over from enrichment, and we can increase Rod’s 70-year supply estimate on recycled LWR fuel by a factor of ten in fast-spectrum reactors, be they sodium, lead, or molten salt.
One (not myself of course, but someone) might speculate such is another motivation of those opposed to pyroprocessing “for anti-proliferation” reasons. “Dangerous radioactive uranium mining” is a frequent calling card of the renewable fossil-fuel environment industry. Being able to run the entire planet for a half millenium with no further fuel mining at all does not play into that particular narrative.
Nor does seawater-extraction.
@Ed Leaver
The prospect of never having to mine the earth for new fuel is sure to upset many other apple carts. Drilling holes and excavating mining pits is BIG business. So is laying out the transportation and logistics effort required to gain access to productive areas and to move the raw materials to market.
I like to think of what human society will be able to accomplish once we throw off the burdening notion that there is a serious limit on our potential to do work based on having a limited supply of energy fuels that are “going to run out someday.”
Many green thinkers like Paul Ehrlich and Hoymar von Ditfurt had a strange aversion towards plentiful side-effect-free energy.
The usefulness of these ideas would not have been lost to the profiteers of enegy scarcity.
Rod: I, personally, am of the opinion that to get the most benefit from nuclear fuel, we need to close the fuel cycle, and put a moratorium on fuel mining eventually, at least temporarily (where temporarily is maybe a few hundred years – so that we can burn down our already mined stocks of SNF and DU).
The reason I suggest a moratorium (this would have to be phased in, with a date set in the future from when it is passed as law, so that existing nuclear plants could continue to run and be able to buy new fuel, until the completion of their lifecycle), is because of the problem that, at least when recycling first starts, it’s expected to be a bit more expensive than newly mined fuel.
It seems to me that, if I understand the economics correctly, the more expensive recycled fuel wouldn’t make nuclear energy much more expensive – but just enough that if a competitor can use newly mined fuel instead of recycled, they would have an advantage over you, so that it essentially forces everyone to buy new fuel because it’s the cheapest option. But, if the higher cost of recycled fuel is required of everyone, then everyone will do it.
Once you do that, then the learning curve kicks in and the cost of recycling gets lower, maybe to about the same as newly mined uranium, or hopefully substantially lower – the hope would be that with recycling, you could avoid the millions or billions per year that would otherwise be spent in mining, transportation, milling, refining, enrichment, manufacturing, etc.
Yeah, that would upset those who would like to get that revenue, but the goal is that the revenue would be re-allocated in the economy in such a way that it provides other jobs in other industries, lowering the cost of energy from nuclear.
Eventually, of course, you’d need to allow new mining, extraction or importation of fuel, because after a few hundred years, you’d start to draw down supplies. I’d say it’d be good to always keep a few decades’ strategic reserves on hand.
@Jeff S
I don’t agree with your initial premise. My goal for a power system is to provide clean, safe, affordable, and reliable energy. It is not to “get the most benefit from nuclear fuel.”
Though some people believe it is somehow wasteful or hazardous to stockpile slightly used fuel or completely unused potential fuel (DU) in containers on or near the surface of the earth, I’m not sure why.
Those containers don’t take up much space and they are not posing any threat to any human that doesn’t mess with they using heavy equipment.
There is nothing inherently wrong with mining the Earth for raw materials. Humans have been engaging in that endeavor for thousands of years and will never stop.
Rather off-topic but today TNYT has an article “The Murky Future of Nuclear Power in the United States” by a Dianne Cardwell. The article contains several small errors but contains a few tidbits such as the NRC regulating backfill dirt!
Possibly Rod would care to write a response here, with a shorter version as a letter submitted to the editor.