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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 8–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Latest News
Nuclear News 40 Under 40: The wait is over
Following the enthusiastic response from the nuclear community in 2024 for the inaugural NN 40 Under 40, the Nuclear News team knew we had to take up the difficult task in 2025 of turning it into an annual event—though there was plenty of uncertainty as to how the community would receive a second iteration this year. That uncertainty was unfounded, clearly, as the tight-knit nuclear community embraced the chance to celebrate its up-and-coming generation of scientists, engineers, and policy makers who are working to grow the influence of this oft-misunderstood technology.
Hirokazu Ohta, Tadashi Inoue, Yoshiharu Sakamura, Kensuke Kinoshita
Nuclear Technology | Volume 150 | Number 2 | May 2005 | Pages 153-161
Technical Paper | Reprocessing | doi.org/10.13182/NT05-A3613
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A concept of pyroprocessing light water reactor (LWR) spent fuels based on an electrochemical reduction technology is proposed, and the material balance of the processing of mixed oxide (MOX) or high-burnup uranium oxide (UO2) spent fuel is evaluated. Furthermore, a burnup analysis for metal fuel fast breeder reactors (FBRs) is conducted on low-decontamination materials recovered by pyroprocessing. In the case of processing MOX spent fuel (40 GWd/t), UO2 is separately collected for ~60 wt% of the spent fuel in advance of the electrochemical reduction step, and the product recovered through the rare earth (RE) removal step, which has the composition uranium:plutonium:minor actinides:fission products (FPs) = 76.4:18.4:1.7:3.5, can be applied as an ingredient of FBR metal fuel without a further decontamination process. On the other hand, the electroreduced alloy of high-burnup UO2 spent fuel (48 GWd/t) requires further decontamination of residual FPs by an additional process such as electrorefining even if RE FPs are removed from the alloy because the recovered plutonium (Pu) is accompanied by almost the same amount of FPs in addition to RE. However, the amount of treated materials in the electrorefining step is reduced to ~10 wt% of the total spent fuel owing to the prior UO2 recovery step. These results reveal that the application of electrochemical reduction technology to LWR spent oxide fuel is a promising concept for providing FBR metal fuel by a rationalized process.