An Approach to Evaluating the Proliferation Resistance of Nuclear Fuel Cycles

The Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute (JNC) believes that the development of future nuclear fuel cycle technology should be conducted with careful consideration for non-proliferation. Past studies concluded that proliferation resistance consists of institutional elements and technical elements. However, difficulties exist in establishing a methodology for evaluating proliferation resistance because there are many elements with complicated interactions and results greatly depend on the assumptions for the evaluation and the surrounding conditions. This paper introduces JNC’s recent proliferation resistance studies. Since the conversion process plays a very important role in nuclear material diversion, this paper calculates how long it takes to convert materials from various nuclear fuel cycles into separated plutonium metal. The calculation assumptions are based on JNC’s experiences with nuclear fuel cycle technologies. Converting the material from a Fast Reactor (FR) cycle without pure plutonium extraction takes twice as long as converting the material from a conventional FR fuel cycle system. While this is only a preliminary evaluation of a single technical element of proliferation resistance, the result will provide guidance for comparing the proliferation resistance of various nuclear fuel cycle technologies.