Darlington station is more than halfway through a $12.8-billion overhaul to refurbish all four of its reactors by the end of 2026 (MATTHEW MCCLEARN / The Globe and Mail)
Darlington station is more than halfway through a $12.8-billion overhaul to refurbish all four of its reactors by the end of 2026 (MATTHEW MCCLEARN / The Globe and Mail)
I wouldn’t say this is correct. Candu reactors do have an advantage in that they don’t require enrichment, but I’d say that they use fuel less efficienctly since their discharge exposure (in units of gigawatt-days per ton of uranium) is much lower than LWRs.
I’m also not sure where you get the idea their waste has to be stored for a shorter period. They use thermal neutrons in fission so they end up with a near identical set of fission products in their fuel to LWRs.
That’s not the only reason the US previously made recycling fuel illegal. Also note that it’s not currently illegal. There are no laws preventing you from setting up a reprocessing facility in the US.
What is preventing it is the fact that it’s more expensive to reprocess than it is to just buy new enriched uranium. Plutonium also has some less favorable reactivity characteristics that make the plant response to transients worse which further worsens the economics (you need to buy more fuel to overcome the impact this has on thermal limits).
The US has a similar percentage coming from nuclear and similarly only produces a few tons of high level waste each year.
You can fit the entire amount of spent fuel that the US has produced on a single good all field at a depth of less than 10 yards.
I think the lack of requirement for enrichment is quite the tradeoff for a lower fuel efficiency, especially considering that not only is uranium quite plentiful on Earth, but Canada is the top three producer of the stuff as well.
That said, I might be wrong on some of the details I mentioned, as I’m working from memory and I’m not nuclear physicist, but I’m sure that the physics for a fast neutron reactor is pretty different from high pressure reactors the US uses.
I haven’t heard that the US had ever rescinded the law on recycling nuclear fuel, though I have heard about how much cheaper it is to mine and refine more than to recycle used fuel. Those are the sort of stuff that market regulations will never address, and is why government regulation and intervention is so crucial.
And I also do understand that the amount of high level waste in the US isn’t really a significant amount anyways. Most numbers that people throw around include low level waste, and I think they’re only marginally dangerous for a year or less? It’s all burned or thrown in regular dumps after about that long as things stand anyways.