Significance of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle in the 21stCentury

Summary The combined effects of increasing industrialization around the world, the threat of global climate change, and decreasing availability of "clean" fossil fuels will make the development of alternative energy sources more important in the coming decades. For fission-based nuclear power to contribute significantly to future energy supplies, it will be essential to maintain the improvements that have been made in plant operational efficiency, to license geological repositories for waste disposal, and to consider again the issue of recycling of spent nuclear fuels to recover its fuel value and to reduce the long-term radiotoxicity of the wastes. In this chapter, we present an overview of the nuclear fuel cycle from spent fuel recycling through the repository performance in the context of its importance to energy production in the 21 st Century.