STATUS OF SPENT FUEL REPROCESSING AND PLUTONIUM RECYCLING IN JAPAN

The Japanese policy on reprocessing spent fuel and recycling plutonium has been made by the Atomic Energy Commission since 1956 that plutonium and uranium in spent fuel are regarded as a possible energy resource to be reused in Japan which is a small energy resource country. The current status of the plutonium recycling in Japan is recovering plutonium at the Tokai Reprocessing Plant (TRP) and fabricating it into fuels for the ATR, FUGEN and the FBRs, JOYO and MONJU, which has been managed by the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation (PNC) for these two decades. And now there is a construction program of an extensive reprocessing plant going on at Rokkasho site, Aomori Pre., conducted by Japan Nuclear Fuels Limited (JNFL), a private sector company founded by the electric utilities which provides another program of utilizing plutonium on a larger scale in LWRS. Spent fuel annually dischargedfrom the nuclear power plants reaches around 900 tons and about 10 percent of this is reprocessed in TRP, part of the rest is shipped to either La Hague and Sellafield. TRP has been operated by PNC since 1977 and during the past 19 years 860 tons of spent fuel has been treated. The plutonium recovered has been converted to mixed oxide through the so called co-conversion with uranium, which is based on ddenigration technology by microwave heating method, a unique process developed by PNC to cope with non-proliferation policy. Plutonium fuel technology development was initiated in 1966, even earlier than the operation of TRP also by PNC and there are three plutonium facilities, the first one is dedicatedto basic research, the second to fabricate fuels for JOYO and FUGEN and the third equipped with state of the art robotics and remote control technology to fabricate fuels for MONJU and JOYO.