Nuclear spent fuel reprocessing facility (nuclear spent fuel reprocessing facility construction)

Emissions generated by the activity within the product supply chain as described in ecoinvent v3.10. This is an immobile infrastructure representing the construction of a nuclear spent fuel reprocessing facility. Reprocessing of spent fuel elements offers the possibility of recovering and recycling valuable fissile materials (U-235 and Pu-239). The utilization of the fissile material contained in the fuel elements takes place in the reprocessing plant by separating the quantitatively small portion (approx. 4%) of radioactive fission products from the main component uranium (approx. 95%) and the usable plutonium (approx. 1%). This is followed by several extraction steps to purify the uranium and plutonium from fission and activation products and unwanted actinides. The THORP plant (BNFL Sellafield UK) and its adjoint facilities (for vitrification and conditioning of waste from light water reactors) have been used as main reference for the estimation of the infrastructure although for the operation most of the data are for UP2 and UP3 plants (Cogema La Hague FR). For the calculation of infrastructure requirements (during operation) the capacity of THORP with a duration of 30 years is used. The associated infrastructure demand factor is 2.78E-8 facility per kgSM. The process includes land use building materials their decommission and machinery. The cut-off classification is allocatable product. The activity type is ordinary transforming activity. The reference product amount is 1.