Modeling and system analysis of fuel cycles for nuclear power sustainability (III): An integrated evaluation

• Published in: Progress in nuclear energy (New series) 2014-07, Vol.74, p.79-90
• Main Authors: Gao, Fanxing, Ko, Won Il
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: AHP; Economics; Fuel cycle policy; Fuel cycles; Mathematical models; MAUF; Nuclear fuel cycles; Nuclear fuels; Nuclear reactor components; Pyroprocessing; RMAUF; Sodium; Sustainability; Utilities
• ISSN: 0149-1970
• DOI: 10.1016/j.pnucene.2014.02.003

Five main criteria are applied to evaluate the thirteen promising nuclear fuel cycle options to explore an generally optimum strategy, i.e., 1) the resource reliability evaluated by uranium consumption, 2) environment friendliness evaluated by radioactive waste generation, 3) proliferation resistance performance evaluated by plutonium inventory, 4) economic competitiveness evaluated by levelized generation cost, and 5) technological readiness evaluated by technology status. A new random multi-attribute utility function (RMAUF) has been developed to perform an integrated evaluation. By adopting two random generation procedures (i.e., random generation of single attribute utility scale and random generation of weighting coefficients), the RMAUF can therefore offer an objective statistic method to collect decisions from a sufficiently large number of group experts, avoiding one subjective opinion from a limited number of decision makers. Overall, sodium fast reactor fuel cycles shows predominant advantages over other fuel cycles, particularly Pyro-SFR(1.0) and PWR (MOX)-SFR (MOX, 1.00). •Development of a new methodology to perform overall evaluation for fuel cycles.•Overall evaluation of thirteen promising cycle options.•Evaluations covering environment, resources, cost, non-proliferation and technology.•Explicit ranking obtained from quantitative analysis.•SFR-involved fuel cycle options showed predominance.