EDF's programme for spent fuel management

The French policy is presently to reprocess spent fuel and before any fuel assembly can be used, it has to be proven that it is reprocessable after irradiation. Nevertheless, in order to maintain the separated plutonium inventory, reprocessing is only implemented for producing the quantity of plutonium to be recycled. That strategy leads to slowly increase the inventory of spent fuel since the number of authorized reactors for recycling is presently limited. This fact and the French law (of 30 December 1991), which demands to study various fuel cycle back end strategies, led to develop an extended reflection concerning spent fuel storage and disposal. (author)