Thorium Fuel Cycle Option Screening in the United States
As part of a nuclear fuel cycle Evaluation and Screening (E&S) study, a wide-range of thorium fuel cycle options were evaluated and their performance characteristics and challenges to implementation were compared to those of other nuclear fuel cycle options based on criteria specified by the Nuclear Energy Office of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The evaluated nuclear fuel cycles included the once-through, limited, and continuous recycle options using critical or externally-driven nuclear energy systems. The E&S study found that the continuous recycle of 233U/Th in fuel cycles using either thermal or fast reactors is an attractive promising fuel cycle option with high effective fuel resource utilization and low waste generation, but did not perform quite as well as the continuous recycle of Pu/U using a fast critical system, which was identified as one of the most promising fuel cycle options in the E&S study. This is because compared to their uranium counterparts the thorium-based systems tended to have higher radioactivity in the short term (about 100 years post irradiation) because of differences in the fission product yield curves, and in the long term (100,000 years post irradiation) because of the decay of 233U and daughters, and because of higher mass flow rates due to lower discharge burnups. Some of the thorium-based systems also require enriched uranium support, which tends to be detrimental to resource utilization and waste generation metrics. Finally, similar to the need for developing recycle fuel fabrication, fuels separations and fast reactors for the most promising options using Pu/U recycle, the future thorium-based fuel cycle options with continuous recycle would also require such capabilities, although their deployment challenges are expected to be higher since such facilities have not been developed in the past to a comparable level of maturity for Th-based systems.
- Research Organization:
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC02-06CH11357
- OSTI ID:
- 1392119
- Journal Information:
- Nuclear Technology, Vol. 194, Issue 2; ISSN 0029-5450
- Publisher:
- Taylor & Francis - formerly American Nuclear Society (ANS)
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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