An overview of spent fuel storage around the world

According to IAEA's statistics, currently there are 459 nuclear power reactors in operation in 34 countries and regions around the world, and the global spent fuel inventory is expected to reach 445000 tons by 2020. At present, only one third of the spent fuel is reprocessed and the remaining two-thirds can only be temporarily stored. Spent fuel storage is a necessary part of the nuclear fuel cycle, and the storage Methods: are generally divided into wet storage and dry storage. Wet storage is stored in pools, which has been implemented for more than 40 years. Dry storage usually places spent fuel assemblies in packaged containers to cool by air, which has reached more than 30 years in some countries. According to their own nuclear fuel cycle strategy, nuclear power countries have formulated their own spent fuel management strategy and selected appropriate spent fuel storage technologies for their own countries. In this paper, storage technologies are briefly compared and introduced, as well as the general situation of spent fuel storage in nuclear countries. (authors)