The world’s largest nuclear power plant, among the facilities taken offline after the 2011 Fukushima accident in Japan, could be...
Romania expects to make a preliminary final investment decision next year on whether to build a small modular reactor plant, which...
US-based advanced nuclear fuel developer Lightbridge Corp. today announced it had achieved a critical milestone in developing its ...
Uranium 101 - The Nuclear Fuel Cycle
The nuclear fuel cycle for the light water reactor (LWR), the most prevalent in use today, is illustrated in the figure below. The cycle consists of a “front end” that comprises the steps necessary to prepare nuclear fuel for reactor operation and a “back end” that comprises the steps necessary to manage the spent nuclear fuel, which is highly radioactive. It is possible, as shown, to extract the unused uranium and plutonium from spent nuclear fuel through chemical reprocessing and to recycle the recovered uranium and plutonium as nuclear fuel.