Transmutation of nuclear waste: Basics, Methods, Perspectives

Arnd Junghans (Institut für Strahlenphysik, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf)

Nuclear power production having the merit of very little greenhouse gas emissions accumulates high-level radioactive waste. Currently final repositories in deep geological formations are in preparation in many countries having a nuclear fuel cycle to safely keep the spent nuclear fuel for up to a million years.

Nuclear reactors using a fast neutron spectrum can fission essentially all long-lived actinides (e.g. Plutonium) and thus transmute the long-lived actinide nuclides into generally short-lived fission products.

Innovative nuclear reactor concepts and accelerator driven systems (ADS) are currently in development that foresee a closed fuel cycle. The majority of the fissile nuclides (Uranium, Plutonium) shall be used for power generation and only fission products will be put into final disposal that needs to last for only 1000 years because of the shorter nuclear half-lives. For the transmutation of high-level radioactive waste a lot of research and development is still required. One aspect is the precise knowledge of nuclear data for reactions with fast neutrons. Nuclear reactions relevant for transmutation are being investigated in the framework of the european project ERINDA which will be presented in this talk.

Supported by the EURATOM FP7 project "ERINDA" and also by the German Federal Ministery for Education and Research (02NUK13A).

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