Sustainability of the Chinese nuclear expansion: The role of ADS to close the nuclear fuel cycle

• We simulated 4 different future nuclear fuel cycle scenarios.
• The ADS and FRs impact on the future Chinese nuclear fuel cycle is studied.
• The partition and transmutation option is compared against the simple reprocessing.
• The MA cycle, Pu flow and spent fuel cycle are assessed.

The civil nuclear energy deployment in China is important for future “Nuclear Renaissance” of China and worldwide. Compared to the other nations that developed their nuclear power energy system in last century, China can take advantage of the research and mistakes made by those states with regards to the back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle (NFC). The spent fuel accumulated by decades of operations of civil nuclear power is today a big burden for the nuclear industry. China must carefully plan the NFC for a sustainable development of the nuclear energy with special consideration to closing the fuel cycle. The present paper addresses the NFC option and implication of a LWR reactors scenario development and of a fast reactor park developed after 2035 and 2050, and covers the historical development of nuclear energy in China (i.e. from the first criticality of the first reactor) to the year 2100. The paper studies the partition and transmutation strategy with the use of accelerator driven system (ADS) to burn the MA to understand the ADS impact on the NFC and to estimate the number and the necessary deploying schedule of the ADS reactors to limit the minor actinides stock build up. The code INFCIS developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is used in the present study.