NUCLEAR WASTE REPROCESSING PLANT
The first large-scale nuclear reactors were built during World War II. These reactors were designed for the production of plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. The only reprocessing required, therefore, was the extraction of the plutonium (free of fission-product contamination) from the spent natural uranium fuel. In 1943, several methods were proposed for separating the relatively small quantity of plutonium from the uranium and fission products. The first method selected, a precipitation process called the Bismuth Phosphate process, was developed and tested at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the 1943-1945 period to produce quantities of plutonium for evaluation and use in weapons programs. ORNL produced the first macroscopic quantities (grams) of separated plutonium with these processes.
The Bismuth Phosphate process was first operated on a large scale at Hanford, Washington, in the latter part of 1944. It was successful for plutonium separation in the emergency situation existing then, but it had a significant weakness: the inability to recover uranium. The first successful solvent extraction process for the recovery of both uranium and plutonium in decontaminated form was developed at ORNL in 1949. It was this process, named PUREX, (see below) which became the current standard method.
In March 1977, fear of nuclear weapons proliferation (especially after India demonstrated nuclear weapons capabilities using reprocessing technology) led President Jimmy Carter to issue a Presidential directive to indefinitely suspend the commercial reprocessing and recycling of plutonium in the U.S. Other nations did not copy the policy and continued to reprocess spent nuclear fuel.
However, in March 1999, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) signed a contract with a consortium comprised of Duke Energy, COGEMA, and Stone & Webster (DCS) to design and operate a Mixed Oxide (MOX) fuel fabrication facility. Site preparation at the Savannah River Site (South Carolina) began in October of 2005. [2]
The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, announced by the secretary of the Department of Energy, Samuel Bodman, on February 6, 2006, is a plan to form an international partnership to reprocess spent nuclear fuel in a way that renders the plutonium in it usable for nuclear fuel but not for nuclear weapons.
Nuclear reprocessing separates any usable elements (e.g., uranium and plutonium) from fission products and other materials in spent nuclear reactor fuels. Usually the goal is to recycle the reprocessed uranium or place these elements in new mixed oxide fuel (MOX), but some reprocessing is done to obtain plutonium for weapons. It is the process that partially closes the loop in the nuclear fuel cycle.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing#History