Energy for the future: Generation Ⅳ fast reactors and the closed fuel cycle

摘要

This article is based on a speech given at the Nuclear Institute Congress in Manchester, in October 2013. The French nuclear fuel cycle strategy is driven by the conviction that nuclear energy is to be maintained as a stable pillar of the French energy mix in the long term. The Fukushima accident has triggered deep and comprehensive safety and economic assessments, which have confirmed that the fundamentals of this strategy are not challenged. Sustainability is a major driver of France's nuclear strategy, in which the fuel cycle policy plays a major role. It is based on the recycling of spent fuel in order to save energy resources and to offer a better management of nuclear waste. This relies on decades of feedback from experience of the La Hague reprocessing plant, the Melox fuel fabrication facility, and Mox fuel use in the French nuclear fleet. France also has substantial experience with fast neutron reactors (even at industrial size with sodium-cooled fast reactors), and as a result is developing Generation Ⅳ fast neutron reactors, and, more specifically, sodium-cooled fast neutron reactors, with the ASTRID programme and its related fuel cycle as the keystone of sustainable energy nuclear development.