Transition Towards a Sustainable Nuclear Fuel Cycle

Future fuel cycle characteristics, feasibility and acceptability will be crucial for the continued development of nuclear energy, especially in the post-Fukushima context. Fuel cycle choices have both long- and short-term impacts, and a holistic assessment of their characteristics, cost and associated safety issues is of paramount importance. This report associates quantified impacts with foreseeable nuclear energy development in different world regions. It gives initial results in terms of uranium resource availability, fuel cycle facility deployment and reactor types. In particular, the need to achieve short doubling times with future fast reactors is investigated and quantified. The report also provides guidelines for performing future studies to account for a wider range of hypotheses on energy demand growth, different hypotheses regarding uranium resource availability and different types of reactors to be deployed.