Waste Stream Analyses for Nuclear Fuel Cycles

A high-level study was performed in Fiscal Year 2009 for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy (NE) Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative (AFCI) to provide information for a range of nuclear fuel cycle options (Wigeland 2009). At that time, some fuel cycle options could not be adequately evaluated since they were not well defined and lacked sufficient information. As a result, five families of these fuel cycle options are being studied during Fiscal Year 2010 by the Systems Analysis Campaign for the DOE NE Fuel Cycle Research and Development (FCRD) program. The quality and completeness of data available to date for the fuel cycle options is insufficient to perform quantitative radioactive waste analyses using recommended metrics. This study has been limited thus far to qualitative analyses of waste streams from the candidate fuel cycle options, because quantitative data for wastes from the front end, fuel fabrication, reactor core structure, and used fuel for these options is generally not yet available.