Pyroprocessing

Argonne National Laboratory pioneered the development of pyrochemical processing, or pyroprocessing, a high-temperature method of recycling reactor waste into fuel, demonstrating it paired with the EBR-II and then proposed commercializing it in the Integral Fast Reactor, the latter which was cancelled by the Clinton Administration in 1994.[1] In 2016, Argonne National Laboratory researchers are developing and refining several pyroprocessing technologies for both light water and fast reactors, with most based on electrorefining rather than conventional wet-chemical/PUREX, to improve the technologies’ commercial viability by increasing their process efficiency and scalability.[2]

Animations of the processing technology are also available.[3][4]

In S.Korea due to the historical Section 123 Agreement between ROK and the U.S,[5] neither enrichment nor PUREX related reprocessing were permitted, with researchers therefore increasingly viewing the "proliferation resistant" pyroprocessing cycle, as the solution for the nation's growing spent fuel inventory, in 2017 forming a collaboration with the U.S and Japan to advance the economics of the process.[6][7] In 2019, proponents of molten salt reactor (MSR) fuel cycles, frequently argue pairing the uncommercialized MSR with the pyroprocessing fuel cycle, as the MSR fuel is already in molten salt form, eliminating two process conversion steps, that of to-and-from metallic fuel, that both the commercially proposed IFR would have required and its antecedent physically demonstrated, when pyroprocessing was fielded in the EBR-II.[8]