🔆 Spent Nuclear Fuel 




✅The Supreme Court (SC) has said the problem of storing spent nuclear fuel from the Kudankulam nuclear  
power plant (KKNPP) has to be worked out. 

✅The SC asked the Tamil Nadu government to file a schedule for the completion of public hearings on the  issue of Away from Reactor (AFR). 

✅The scheme for the storage of spent fuel in a nuclear power plant was two-fold- 

✅one facility is located within the reactor building, generally known as the spent fuel storage pool/bay 

✅The other is located away from the reactor, called the Away from Reactor (AFR) Spent Fuel Storage  Facility. 

Storage of Spent fuel  

✅It is thermally hot and very radioactive (radioactive waste, and also plutonium) so it is placed into water  
cooling pools at the reactor site for at least five years.  

✅These pools are at least 20 feet deep and provide shielding and a cooling mechanism.  

✅ It is then moved to large storage casks where it passively cools and awaits final disposal.  
Can Used Fuel can be Recycled? 

✅ It contains large amounts of uranium, therefore, lots of usable fuel still remains which makes recycling  
possible. It can be recycled to make new fuel and by-products. 

✅To recycle the waste, it is chemically processed and used in fast reactors. 

✅Reprocessing is much more expensive and difficult than mining uranium and enriching it. 

✅Currently, France and Japan recycle fuel one time before it is disposed, and the US previously had a recycling program that was shut down