Once such fossil fuels as petroleum and natural gas are burned, these fuels can no longer be used. Conversely, uranium fuel continues burning for three to four years and can be used repeatedly through reprocessing. The nuclear fuel used for a Nuclear power plant contains residual (unburned) uranium and newly produced plutonium.
      For example, when U-235 of 3% enrichment is used as nuclear fuel, the nuclear fuel after power generation will contain 1% residual (unburned) U-235 and 1% newly produced plutonium. The spent fuel is chemically processed at the reprocessing plant for use as new fuel. Recoverd uranium and plutonium are mixed with natural uranium or residual uranium (depleted uranium) after enrichment and fabricated into MOX fuels or Mixed uranium-plutonium Oxide. In the light-water reactor used in many nuclear power stations, energy is primarily obtained from U-235. Thus, the reprocessing plant may be considered "a site where semi-national energy resources are created."

      Such reprocessing can double the uranium utilization efficiency in a light-water reactor. Moreover, the use of plutonium for fast breeder reactors offers excellent plutonium conversion efficiency, and is expected to significantly improve the utilization efficiency by a factor of about 60 in the future.

The Reprocessing Plant is now under final commissioning test. We confirm safety quality and stability quality of the plant equipment with using spent fuels at this final stage.       The maximum reprocessing capacity of the plant is 800tons U/year, enough to reprocess the spent fuel produced from 40 reactors at 1,000 MW-class nuclear power plants. That is nearly equal to 80% of annual spent fuel generation in Japan. The unique feature in this plant is uranium-plutonium co-denitration process. Owing to this process, the plant does not produce plutonium as a single element, which has considerable advantages for non-proliferation. Operations at all reprocessing facilities, located separately, are controlled and monitored at the central control room. The mainframe computer and central control board enables efficient operation.

Entire construction site

Central control room

Spent fuel contained in transportation cask is shipped from nuclear power stations. These casks are temporarily stored in the storage area and then sent to the spent fuel storage building. The entire process of removing spent fuel from a cask to storage pools are performed under water.

Spent fuel storage building