Comparing the environmental impacts of uranium- and thorium-based fuel cycles with different recycle options

作者：Ault Timothy^*; Krahn Steven^*; Croff Allen

来源：Progress in Nuclear Energy, 2017, 100: 114-134.

DOI：10.1016/j.pnucene.2017.05.010

• Thorium
• Fuel cycle analysis
• Environmental impact
• Health and safety

This article addresses the comparative environmental impacts of possible future implementations of several uranium- and thorium-based fuel cycles at steady-state. After carefully defining an appropriate, meaningful, and consistent reference set of fuel cycles for both thorium- and uranium-based options along with varied extents of recycle-material flow analyses are conducted to determine the mass throughputs in the constituent steps of the fuel cycles. These mass flows are combined with mass normalized environmental metrics encompassing safety, waste (both low-and high-level) management, and resource sustainability to provide overall perspectives on the environment, health, and safety performance of these fuel cycles. The results indicate that the extent of recycle is generally a more important predictor of environmental metric performance than whether the fuel cycle uses uranium or thorium, although there are still some differences between uranium and thorium for certain metrics. Different fuel cycles perform better with regards to certain metrics, and there is no "best" fuel cycle with regards to environmental impact; the varying relative performance is discussed.

• 出版日期2017-9