Spent Fuel Reprocessing: More Value for Money Spent in a Geological Repository?

Today, each utility or country operating nuclear power plants can select between two long-term spent fuel management policies: either, spent fuel is considered as waste to dispose of through direct disposal or, spent fuel is considered a resource of valuable material through reprocessing-recycling. Reading and listening to what is said in the nuclear community, we understand that most people consider that the choice of policy is, actually, a choice among two technical paths to handle spent fuel: direct disposal versus reprocessing. This very simple situation has been recently challenged by analysis coming from countries where both policies are on survey. For example, ONDRAF of Belgium published an interesting study showing that, economically speaking for final disposal, it is worth treating spent fuel rather than dispose of it as a whole, even if there is no possibility to recycle the valuable part of it. So, the question is raised: is there such a one-to-one link between long term spent fuel management political option and industrial option? The purpose of the presentation is to discuss the potential advantages and drawbacks of spent fuel treatment as an implementation of the policy that considers spent fuel as waste to dispose of. Based on technical considerations and industrial experience, we will study qualitatively, and quantitatively when possible, the different answers proposed by treatment to the main concerns of spent-fuel-as-a-whole geological disposal.