RE: [cdn-nucl-l] [Fwd: What To Do With CANDU's Used Fuel]

["Chris Stokes" <C.A.Stokes@lboro.ac.uk>]

Talk of reprocessing makes me wonder how hard early closure of BNFL's THORP
plant will hit worldwide reprocessing capacity.

As you'll probably have noticed, 83,000 litres of the liquor produced when
irradiated fuel is dissolved in nitric acid were discovered in April to have
leaked into the clarification cell's containment vessel there. Most
reprocessing operations appear to have been halted and are not likely to
resume, by all accounts, for months. A senior official at the UK's new
Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has been widely reported as saying, 'The
view is that THORP should never restart.' It wasn't due for closure until
2010.

As the UK and France have dominated commercial reprocessing for some time
now, how will the future of commercial reprocessing be affected if the NDA
and the government together decide the economics are in favour of closure?

Chris