Spent nuclear fuel management : Trends and back end scenarios

All kinds of radioactive wastes including spent nuclear fuel have to be managed with special care to ensure public and environmental safety. Therefore any country including the nuclear energy option in its energy policy has to provide an appropriate program for the safe treatment and final disposal of spent nuclear fuel, which is an unavoidable product of nuclear power plants. Temporary storage is the essential step of all alternatives of spent fuel management and inevitable final step is the geological disposal. Therefore any national policy regarding spent fuel management must include short term and long term planning for the safe storage of spent nuclear fuel including final disposal in geological repository. Available alternatives for the spent fuel management are (1) the closed fuel cycle, (2) the once-through fuel cycle, (3) deferral of a final decision. The resources that are available to the country concerned will be the limiting conditions for establishing a national policy and the choice of the one of the above stated alternatives. Nuclear infrastructure, personnel training availability and relative cost of spent fuel alternatives are the main resources to be considered. In this study, national policy considerations regarding spent nuclear fuel management will be discussed and a frame of the spent fuel management strategy for Turkey will be proposed for back-end of fuel cycle in nuclear scenario