Year
2002
Abstract
There has been some concern in recent years about the buildup of separated civil plutonium in the world. In order to address issues related to these concerns, it is useful to have models that provide quantitative predictions of this buildup, under various scenarios. Our goal was to develop a publicly available model that would allow users to specify scenarios of their own, not simply the scenarios we envisioned. We believe this approach will provide a more complete understanding of the processes involved in the creation, storage, and utilization of potentially destructive nuclear material. Western Europe, namely France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Switzerland, and Japan, were chosen as a starting point, because the issues present in these countries, we believe, represent the pressing issues in all nuclear countries and may fully address the current problems in the buildup of reactor grade plutonium in the world today. In addition, these countries have contributed a substantial quantity of material to the amount of civil separated plutonium present today. We have developed a model of the nuclear fuel cycle in Western Europe and Japan using STELLA. Our model uses STELLA’s simple “stock and flow” structure to describe the discharge, storage, and reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel from commercial power reactors, and the creation, storage, and utilization of reactorgrade civil separated plutonium in these regions. This provides an interface that is user-friendly and can be run on any computing platform that can operate the STELLA software. In addition, detailed changes can be easily made to the model, if the user desires. We will describe features of the model from the perspective of a user, give the results of a few scenarios, and delineate plausibility tests of the model.