How Uranium Enrichment Works (sub-page 2)
(all info lifted from http://www.world-nuclear.org/education/nfc.htm, working on permission/rights)
To prepare uranium for use in a nuclear reactor, it undergoes the steps of mining and milling, conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication. These steps make up the 'front end' of the nuclear fuel cycle.
After uranium has been used in a reactor to produce electricity it is known as 'spent fuel' and may undergo a further series of steps including temporary storage, reprocessing, and recycling before eventual disposal as waste. Collectively these steps are known as the 'back end' of the fuel cycle.
1) Mining and Milling - Uranium is usually mined by either surface (open cut) or underground mining techniques, depending on the depth at which the ore body is found. In Australia the Ranger mine in the Northern Territory is open cut, while Olympic Dam in South Australia is an underground mine (which also produces copper, with some gold and silver). The newest Canadian mines are underground.
From these, the mined uranium ore is sent to a mill which is usually located close to the mine. At the mill the ore is crushed and ground to a fine slurry which is leached in sulfuric acid to allow the separation of uranium from the waste rock. It is then recovered from solution and precipitated as uranium oxide (U308) concentrate.*
* Sometimes this is known as "yellowcake", though it is finally khaki in colour.
Some mines in Australia, USA and Kazakhstan use in situ leaching (ISL) to extract the uranium from the ore body underground and bring it to the surface in solution. It is recovered in much the same fashion.
U308 is the uranium product which is sold. About 200 tonnes is required to keep a large (1000 MWe) nuclear power reactor generating electricity for one year.
2) Conversion - Because uranium needs to be in the form of a gas before it can be enriched, the U308 is converted into the gas uranium hexafluoride (UF6) at a conversion plant in Europe, Russia or North America.
3) Enrichment - The vast majority of all nuclear power reactors in operation and under construction require 'enriched' uranium fuel in which the proportion of the U-235 isotope has been raised from the natural level of 0.7% to about 3.5% or slightly more. The enrichment process removes about 85% of the U-238 by separating gaseous uranium hexafluoride into two streams: One stream is enriched to the required level and then passes to the next stage of the fuel cycle. The other stream is depleted in U-235 and is called 'tails'. It is mostly U-238. So little U-235 remains in the tails (usually less than 0.25%) that it is of no further use for energy, though such 'depleted uranium' is used in metal form in yacht keels, as counterweights, and as radiation shielding, since it is 1.7 times denser than lead. A small number of reactors, notably the Canadian CANDU and early British gas-cooled reactors, do not require uranium to be enriched.
4) Fuel Fabrication- Enriched UF6 is transported to a fuel fabrication plant where it is converted to uranium dioxide (UO2) powder and pressed into small pellets. These pellets are inserted into thin tubes, usually of a zirconium alloy (zircalloy) or stainless steel, to form fuel rods. The rods are then sealed and assembled in clusters to form fuel assemblies for use in the core of the nuclear reactor. Some 25 tonnes of fresh fuel is required each year by a 1000 MWe reactor.
5) Nuclear Reactor - Several hundred fuel assemblies make up the core of a reactor. For a reactor with an output of 1000 megawatts (MWe), the core would contain about 75 tonnes of low-enriched uranium. In the reactor core the U-235 isotope fissions or splits, producing heat in a continuous process called a chain reaction. The process depends on the presence of a moderator such as water or graphite, and is fully controlled.
Some of the U-238 in the reactor core is turned into plutonium and about half of this is also fissioned, providing about one third of the reactor's energy output. As in fossil-fuel burning electricity generating plants, the heat is used to produce steam to drive a turbine and an electric generator, in this case producing about 7 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in one year.
To maintain efficient reactor performance, about one-third of the spent fuel is removed every year or 18 months, to be replaced with fresh fuel.
6) Spent Fuel Storage - Spent fuel assemblies taken from the reactor core are highly radioactive and give off a lot of heat. They are therefore stored in special ponds which are usually located at the reactor site, to allow both their heat and radioactivity to decrease. The water in the ponds serves the dual purpose of acting as a barrier against radiation and dispersing the heat from the spent fuel.
Spent fuel can be stored safely in these ponds for long periods. It can also be dry stored in engineered facilities, cooled by air. However, both kinds of storage are intended only as an interim step before the spent fuel is either reprocessed or sent to final disposal. The longer it is stored, the easier it is to handle, due to decay of radioactivity.
There are two alternatives for spent fuel:
- reprocessing to recover the usable portion of it
- long-term storage and final disposal without reprocessing.
7) Reprocessing - Spent fuel still contains approximately 96% of its original uranium, of which the fissionable U-235 content has been reduced to less than 1%. About 3% of spent fuel comprises waste products and the remaining 1% is plutonium (Pu) produced while the fuel was in the reactor and not "burned" then.
Reprocessing separates uranium and plutonium from waste products (and from the fuel assembly cladding) by chopping up the fuel rods and dissolving them in acid to separate the various materials. Recovered uranium can be returned to the conversion plant for conversion to uranium hexafluoride and subsequent re-enrichment. The reactor-grade plutonium can be blended with enriched uranium to produce a mixed oxide (MOX) fuel*, in a fuel fabrication plant.
8) Vitrification - After reprocessing the liquid high-level waste can be calcined (heated strongly) to produce a dry powder which is incorporated into borosilicate (Pyrex) glass to immobilise the waste. The glass is then poured into stainless steel canisters, each holding 400 kg of glass. A year's waste from a 1000 MWe reactor is contained in 5 tonnes of such glass, or about 12 canisters 1.3 metres high and 0.4 metres in diameter. These can be readily transported and stored, with appropriate shielding.
9) Final disposal - The waste forms envisaged for disposal are vitrified high-level wastes sealed into stainless steel canisters, or spent fuel rods encapsulated in corrosion-resistant metals such as copper or stainless steel. The most widely accepted plans are for these to be buried in stable rock structures deep underground. Many geological formations such as granite, volcanic tuff, salt or shale will be suitable. The first permanent disposal is expected to occur about 2010.
Most countries intend to introduce final disposal sometime after about 2010, when the quantities to be disposed of will be sufficient to make it economically justifiable.