Progress of metal fuel and pyroprocess fuel cycle project of CRIEPI

Recent steep rise in uranium ore price clearly show the future demand on the nuclear power as Co2 emission free energy supply. However, breeding of plutonium by fast reactor is necessary to sustain long-term nuclear energy supply because uranium ore has a certain limit. On the other hand, use of plutonium usually faces the matters of unclear proliferation, high-fuel cycle cost, build-up of radioactive waste of long half-lives, etc. The metal fuel fast reactor cycle is one of the most attractive technologies to answer these matters. The nature of metal fuel enable us to employ pyrometallurgical reprocessing which has an intrinsic proliferation-resistant feature due to inherent difficulty of extracting weapon-usable Pu. Long-lived transuranium elements are recovered together with Pu in electrorefining step, and are served for fuel fabrication to be transmuted in the fast reactor. Combination of the pyrometallurgical reprocessing technology and the injection fuel casting technology offers substantial reduction of fuel cycle cost compared with the conventional wet reprocessing and the pellet fabrication system. Hence CRIEPI has been studying the metal fuel fast reactor cycle since 1987 as an outstanding alternative in the future energy source. In this paper, current state of the arts in development of metal fuel and pyroprocess fuel cycle technology is summarized