Field Report: Discover pragmatic examples of customer benefits
TNS Sofres study: what 7 countries think about used nuclear fuel
Position Paper – Robustness of the Cooling Function
AREVA WNFC 2012 Presentation
12th shipment of vitrified nuclear waste from France to Germany (in french)
24 hours in La Hague
Compacting structural and technological waste processing active liquid effluents
"Georges Besse II" brochure
Recycling and new reactors: AREVA advantages
Optimized fuel and end waste management
AREVA helps its customers to fully benefit from the energy potential of their spent fuel by recycling it. This option also enables them to condition their final waste and to reduce the volume and radiotoxicity.
AREVA offers global management services for used fuel. We recycle plutonium and uranium in the form of MOX and ERU fuels. Customers opting for this global management process benefit greatly from nuclear energy - a recyclable energy.
The group also offers a range of products and services covering all or part of the global provision, to suit customer needs as closely as possible.
Spent fuel treatment
This service includes the collection, transportation and treatment of used fuel.
Treatment is carried out at the AREVA plant at La Hague (France). It consists of:
- Recovering recyclable materials from used fuel (96%):
- MOX: a mixture of uranium and plutonium oxides.
Learn more about MOX Fuel assemblies - ERU: Enriched Recycled Uranium (ERU).
Learn more about ERU Fuel assemblies
- MOX: a mixture of uranium and plutonium oxides.
- Conditioning non-recoverable products, mainly consisting of fission products and structural sections from assemblies.
The final waste is sent back to customers in a standardized, stable form, reduced in both volume and radiotoxicity.
A competitive, environmentally-friendly solution
- A competitive solution: recycling does not affect the cost of nuclear power generation. It has a financial impact comparable to the direct disposal. It allows a 25% saving in uranium resources.
- The flexibility of a diversified supply: operators use their spent fuel and develops a diversified portfolio. Eight spent UOX assemblies enable the manufacture of about one ERU assembly and one other MOX assembly.
- Bolstering the certain overall costs in the cycle. Recycling represents a controlled cost. Conversely, the disposal of spent fuel requires technologies that are still in development, meaning that the costs remain unknown. The practice of recycling minimizes the uncertainties linked to supply costs.
- Final waste packaging: non-recyclable materials are packaged in a safe, stable and standardized manner. Their volume is reduced by around five times and their radiotoxicity is ten times less than that found in direct storage. Standardization enables waste to be placed into shared storage.
- A solution perfectly aligned with non-proliferation goals: the final waste is free of fissionable material.
A high-performance, long-lasting industrial tool
Our offer uses AREVA plants in La Hague (France), Melox (France) and Romans (France), together with our chemical processing and enrichment facilities.
Transportation is carried out through our transportation sector.
Forty years experience
AREVA has already processed 25,000 tons of spent fuels and manufactured over 10,000 recycled fuel assemblies.
