r/nuclear • u/Shot-Addendum-809 • 7d ago

Funding allocated for UK plutonium disposal research

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/funding-allocated-for-uk-plutonium-disposal-research

The UK's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has been allocated GBP154 million (USD207 million) in government funding to develop specialised capabilities to enable plutonium disposal. The government announced earlier this year that the country's stockpile of plutonium will be immobilised and disposed of in a geological disposal facility.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) said the investment, spanning five years, will allow the group, working with supply-chain partners, to design, install and operate specialist laboratory facilities at Sellafield, where experts will test and prove the technology that will be used to immobilise the plutonium, locking it away in a stable form.

It said work will focus on early research and development for the programme over the next two years, with 50 people already in post. In addition, GBP2.5 million is being invested in establishing a GBP5 million Plutonium Ceramics Academic Hub in partnership with the Universities of Manchester and Sheffield, which is central to developing the technical expertise and subject matter experts needed for the unique work.

The UK's stockpile of some 140 tonnes of civil plutonium is currently stored at the Sellafield site in Cumbria, in line with regulatory requirements.

Two technologies for immobilisation are being explored: Disposal MOX (DMOX), which creates ceramic pellets designed for disposal; and Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIP), where high pressures and temperatures are used to create a rock-like ceramic material. The NDA said progress is already underway, with two new state-of-the-art laboratories being installed at Sellafield to develop and prove the technologies.

Once immobilised, the material is intended for final disposal in a geological disposal facility and NDA group subsidiary Nuclear Waste Services is leading work to ensure the final waste form is suitable for the repository.

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u/IntoxicatedDane 7d ago

Why not use the plutonium as mox fuel?

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u/warriorscot 7d ago

No commercial demand for it, it's difficult and expensive because of the different security and safety requirements. It then generates much more difficult to handle spent fuel. Which means it's actually cheaper to just get rid of it than to try and use it.

And for it to be viable long term you need to have a way to produce it. The UK operated reprocessing for decades, the conclusion was that the juice isn't worth the squeeze when you factor in all the costs.

Historically you could argue you didn't know the economics. We now actually know the economics so anyone that says you should use plut and reprocess is either mad or disingenuous.

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u/DP323602 7d ago

... or French?

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u/warriorscot 7d ago

They fall under the former category of mad. I don't think even for them the juice is worth the squeeze, but they aren't afraid of a project that generates jobs for the sake of it. Which is just about the only good rational for it is that as a way to dump money into your economy it isn't the worst.

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u/LegoCrafter2014 6d ago

The Russians use reprocessing and are planning to use their breeder reactors for fuel cycle services, so they must have decided that there is some economic benefit that isn't just make-work.

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u/warriorscot 6d ago

Why? Are they somehow a capitalist Utopia.

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u/LegoCrafter2014 6d ago

No, but they clearly don't care about things like waste disposal or their people in general, so the only reasonable assumption is money.

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u/warriorscot 6d ago

Or the reason you produced it in the first place... or simply because that's what we do, which until the facilities crumbled round their ears why some other countries did it until recently.

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u/Vegetable_Unit_1728 6d ago edited 6d ago

BS! Beside receiving MOX in a shielded cask instead of fresh fuel casks, you’re the crazy one, not the French.

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u/warriorscot 6d ago

There's quite a difference between those two things, the smallest cask for spent plut for a normal scale reactor just on it's own is a "what the hell do we do with that thing" problem.

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u/Vegetable_Unit_1728 6d ago

Wrong. I've designed, licensed and operated those casks, what might you know about them? 100 ton cask is nothing. As you probably know, that is the weight of the typical shielded cask moving discharged fuel out of the plant. Easy out, easy in.

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u/warriorscot 6d ago

I'm one if those rates people that had to approve and pay for them. Its far from nothing, unless you can do sea transfer or rail transfer they're a nightmare in any number more than one. 

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u/Vegetable_Unit_1728 6d ago

How do you think discharged fuel gets put into dry storage in the back yard?

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u/warriorscot 6d ago

Repro fuel isnt ideally stored dry at all after its spent, certainly not with plut in it.

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u/LegoCrafter2014 6d ago

At least the EPR can handle MOX. Two EPRs are being built at Hinkley Point C, and Sizewell C might be built someday. Fuel is a small enough part of nuclear power's cost (especially compared to interest) that I would rather pay slightly more for a more closed fuel cycle than risk the energy companies raising bills by a massive amount (far more than the actual cost increase) when uranium prices rise like they do whenever oil prices rise.

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u/warriorscot 6d ago

You just solve that with more Uranium, and the UK maintains very large stockpiles. You would need the price to be a lot higher to justify the tens of billions more you would need in handing and disposal costs. 

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u/LegoCrafter2014 6d ago

True, but you know what the energy industry is like. If the input costs go up by a bit, then they raise prices by a lot and don't lower them when input costs fall. It will also be useful if the use of nuclear power is expanded by a lot.

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u/warriorscot 6d ago

It would cost the same at a minimum as a whole EPR, that's not a little and it's operating costs go on the price of the fuel. And that's not counting disposability.

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u/LegoCrafter2014 6d ago

So it would further entrench the nuclear power industry's problem of massive fixed costs and stable variable costs. France and Russia have been reprocessing nuclear waste for decades, but they have much larger fleets than the UK does, so they can spread the fixed cost over more reactors while still benefiting from the more stable variable costs.

Can't the fission products just be vitrified (at high cost)? As far as I can tell, processing the plutonium and fabricating it into MOX fuel is too expensive to be worth it for only two reactors, but worth it for a larger fleet. I still think that it would be a waste of plutonium to just dispose of it.

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u/warriorscot 6d ago

It's not worth it even in large fleets economically. To make it worth it you have to pretend the cost of Uranium might skyrocket... it never has in a meaningful way. The value of the original material is really high, but theres an enough is enough point, which everyone hit in the 1960s.

You can extract and vitrify, thats how you get it in the first place. By like most repro fuel the stuff you start to build up gets harder and harder to manage, it makes reprocessing harder and harder and more and more dangerous, it also makes your storage harder and more expensive. And your fuel quality gets worse and worse unless you get better at better at reprocessing.

Its a snake eating its own tail in the worst way. Instead of having cheap fuel, that is easy to use, doesnt have anything special to design around, doesnt have much inherent hazard when its fresh, doesnt need significant security and is easy to dispose of.... you end up having to deal with all those problems, and you end up with this massive dangerous legacy of heavily contaminated process and storage facilties.

You also and unfortunately having had to deal with it... end up contaminating people that otherwise wouldnt. And even the ones it doesnt harm directly end up living with it, and some sinply dont want to do that and take a very final decision, which is pretty rough.

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u/LegoCrafter2014 5d ago edited 5d ago

and some sinply dont want to do that and take a very final decision, which is pretty rough.

What do you mean? The government taking the decision to just dispose of the plutonium despite the possibility of processing it into fuel, or people deciding to kill themselves?

France and Russia have used reprocessing for decades, and the only deaths that I have heard of are from accidents (like France's furnace explosion in 2011) or from the early days of their nuclear programs. I haven't heard of any suicides.

I'm not denying that uranium is much less hassle and uranium prices are currently extremely cheap. I'm saying that if the use of nuclear power increased, then uranium prices would also increase. France shut down Superphenix after years of poor performance and pressure from the Greens, but Russia is planning to use reprocessing and breeder reactors for fuel cycle services.

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u/warriorscot 5d ago

The latter, none of us report on them, we all report contaminations, but you'll find that unless the outcome can directly be attributed we dont report it again. And we dont report at all on the wider negative outcome like the people that arent able to do their jobs anymore because you cant clear them for further dose risk.

We also dont report other deaths and injuries, people are harmed during the construction, maintenance and decommissioning of the facilities and if they arent expressly radiation injuries they dont get attributed. All of the countries have those and Russias record is pretty poor on that, as is the UKs.

The thing is the Uranium cost isnt very volatile, it actually suffers from low demand issues rather than high. Using it more would reduce the cost per tonne rather than increase it.

And the thing is you don't have to, if you dont repro to begin with and only have spent fuel. You can go back later and reprocess it if the market conditions change. They wont change so fast that even today's stockpiling levels would allow you to adapt.

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u/DP323602 7d ago

I believe there is little or no demand for that in the UK and too much politics involved in exporting MOx fuel.

Indeed, the UK tried that in the past, but with no commercial success.

If I remember correctly, France may be using or planning to use MOx in some of their reactors.

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u/SteelHeid 7d ago

Given that China and Russia are expanding nuclear capacity, with China planning 300 reactors, and exports happening all over the place, and maybe this AI stuff (or electrification) leads to a bigger nuclear deployment even in the west "eventually", how long before uranium gets expensive and a closed cycle starts making sense? Seems that China and Russia a researching the tech just to have it ready and fully matured when that happens.

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u/careysub 6d ago

Given that current resources at $130/kg will last for about 100 years (67,000 tons of U a year from 6 millionish tons) then doubling world reactor capacity would cut it to a 50 year supply, but 75 years at $260/kg. At this price extracting uranium from seawater will be competitive, so the answer is probably never.

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u/LegoCrafter2014 6d ago

Extracting uranium from seawater is energy-intensive enough that you would need to use reprocessing and breeder reactors for it to make sense in terms of EROI.

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u/careysub 6d ago

An actual article about the current level of the technology:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53366-3

An acrylamide based polymer can collects as much as a gram of uranium per gram of polymer. The U-235 energy content of a gram of uranium is 5.6x108 J, the energy content of making the polymer would be similar to the energy cost of making any polymer (the mild preparation procedure is in the paper), so around 105 J.

This is an energy advantage of around ten thousand to one.

These would be deployed either on tethered frames in strong ocean currents (the Gulf Stream is 9 km/h) or piggy backed on ocean desalination plants so the incremental energy cost of circulating the water is zero.

But ocean water extraction won't be needed for half a century or more, and the tech will be even better then.

It is already to the point that it has become a proliferation concern -- any nation with a coastline and chemical industry could obtain uranium for a weapons program regardless of international controls.

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u/LegoCrafter2014 6d ago

You still need to enrich that uranium. Uranium can be obtained using various ways, including mining and as a byproduct of fertiliser production.

Even though desalination would make it much more practical, the technology that you mentioned is still at the laboratory phase, while reprocessing and breeder reactors are in commercial operation (but still expensive).

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u/Reasonable_Mix7630 7d ago

Everybody does.

Okay, every not backward country. No plutonium fuel in USA.

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u/DP323602 7d ago

... and none currently used in the UK either, or so I believe. In olden days, I think PFR at Dounreay used a fuel cycle based on MOx.

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u/Spare-Pick1606 7d ago

Neither the US and especially not the UK are no longer the leaders in nuclear technology ( reactors or fuel cycle ) .

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u/Vegetable_Unit_1728 6d ago

What the heck are you babbling about? About a third of LWR energy comes from comes Pu.

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u/Reasonable_Mix7630 7d ago

If I was like any nuclear power provider anywhere in the World I would try my best to nick said plutonium.

We are talking about couple of centuries worth of fuel. Don't even need to lie: this plutonium will be destroyed on sub-atomic level. Eventually, given enough time.

Are British people trying to beat Americans in "who wave the biggest cretins in the government" contest? What the hell is wrong with this World? Are we living in one of Lesli Nilsen's parodies?

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u/DP323602 7d ago

If Wikipedia is correct, the specific energy of Pu-239 is 23 GWhr/kg so 140 tonnes would be worth about 3200 TWhr of thermal energy, if used in a conventional thermal reactor.

That's roughly equivalent to about 1000 TWhr of electricity or about 5 times the annual average UK energy demand.

But a more attractive use might be as initial fuel for an advanced breeder reactor.

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u/Reasonable_Mix7630 6d ago

Don't need an advanced reactor.

Just use CANDU.

Though if you go more advanced route - e.g. by using reactor like BN - you can turn that fuel into an infinite supply of fuel. Yes its already running on fuel for it made just from plutonium separated from spent fuel and not enriched uranium.

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u/Vegetable_Unit_1728 6d ago

Or to poison politicians.

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u/Ok_Divide4824 6d ago

What a waste. In however many years we've been collecting this stuff we never tried to actually figure out or plan a use for it? From the amount there its got to be enough to run at least one nuclear reactor for its lifespan

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u/careysub 6d ago

The plans to separate the plutonium operated without reference to any planned use of the material. They just assumed it would be used some day.

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u/Ok_Divide4824 6d ago

Typical.

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u/LegoCrafter2014 6d ago

They assumed that another breeder reactor would be built, but that was cancelled. They then assumed that it would be easier to dispose of than used Magnox and AGR fuel.

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u/DP323602 6d ago edited 6d ago

The Sellafield MOx Plant used to make MOx for overseas customers but closed long ago.

Metallic Magnox fuel was not considered chemically stable for long term storage and disposal. So it was argued that reprocessing was necessary for all spent Magnox fuel.

AGR fuel was reprocessed in THORP until that closed.

So now it seems they want to make the civil Pu stocks stable for long term disposable, either by making it into MOx or synthetic rock.

The HIP/synthetic rock process must have some strong champions somewhere....

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u/Vegetable_Unit_1728 6d ago

Dispose of it in a power reactor, morons. You trying to act like Mericans or something?