Field Report: Discover pragmatic examples of customer benefits
24 hours in La Hague
12th shipment of vitrified nuclear waste from France to Germany (in french)
Fuel, the heart of nuclear fission
MOX for peace
AREVA, European leader in nuclear fuel
Recycling and new reactors: AREVA advantages
Environmental protection in La Hague (France)
MELOX, world leader in the fabrication of MOX
Compacting structural and technological waste processing active liquid effluents
General presentation
The Back End business group offers electricity companies management solutions for used fuel. AREVA is notably the world leader in the field of recycling, enabling the recovery of used fuels and the fabrication of new, usable fuels in reactors.
Four complementary business units
Recycling
- Its business: making nuclear power a recyclable energy by recovering the reusable materials (uranium and plutonium) from used fuel for their subsequent re-use in the form of new fuels, such as MOX, in nuclear reactors. AREVA has a very significant technological and industrial advance in recycling, and is now the international leader in this field.
- In figures: 96% of used fuel can be recycled thanks to the high technology solutions developed by AREVA.
Nuclear Site Value Development
- Its business: the supervision of clean-up operations, equipment and installations, as well as nuclear facility dismantling in the AREVA group's decommissioned facilities. These operations concern a number of facilities located in France at La Hague, Marcoule, Cadarache, Annecy and Grenoble.
- In figures: in France, the provisions set aside by the facility owners, i.e., the CEA, AREVA and EDF, for redeveloping sites at the end of their lifecycle is around 30 billion euros.
Logistics
- Its business: the design and manufacture of containers for the transportation and storage of nuclear materials. This business also provides services for the transportation of nuclear materials for the whole group.
- In figures: the Logistics business unit makes 50% of its sales in Europe, and counts most of the continent's electricity companies as its customers.
Clean-up
- Its business: the performance of site support operations in the nuclear industry. This business also plays a role as an industrial operator at waste management sites.
- In figures: the Clean-up business unit is an industry leader in France, with a market share of nearly 25%.
Open cycle, closed cycle
Electricity companies have 2 management options for their used fuel:
The open cycle
This consists of treating used fuel as a non-reusable material. Material is stored in pools or in dry storage systems in purpose-built sites.
Storage solutions currently on the market enable electricity companies to manage their volumes over a period of several decades. The long-term challenge will be the final disposal of their stock of used fuel as part of nuclear waste management programs which are often national in scope.
The closed cycle
This consists of treating used fuel as containing a large amount of usable materials capable of producing even more energy. It is processed to separate this usable material - uranium and plutonium - from end waste. This material only represents around 4% of the volume of used fuel.
The recovered uranium and plutonium is recycled into fuel for nuclear power plants in the form of MOX (based on plutonium and uranium) or enriched uranium.
AREVA is the world leader on both open and closed cycle markets.
