With rapid growing of nuclear power plants in China, the safety management of spent fuel becomes most important issues. Accelerator Driven Sub-critical System (ADS) takes the spallation neutrons as external neutron source to drive the sub-critical reactor, which will provide the hard and wide neutron spectra, large flux and inherent safety. In order to increase the utilization rate of uranium resources and decrease the disposal of high high-level radioactive waste, the Accelerator Driven Used Fuel Recycle (ADFUR) was proposed by institute of Modern physics, Chinese Academy of Science. The idea is only to remove the volatile fission products and to separate neutron poison such as rare elements partially from PWR spent fuel, the rest will be refabricated to new nuclear fuel in carbide form and burn in China Initiative Accelerator Driven System (CiADS). This reprocessing procedure will avoid separating magnanimous uranium and plutonium from spent fuel in contrast with the PUREX reprocess.
Disassembling, extraction, and cutting operations of actual spent PWR fuel assembly have been conducted in a laboratory scale for “Direct Use of PWR spent fuel In CANDU reactors” (DUPIC) experiment in KAERI in last two decades. High temperature oxidation/reduction can pulverize spent fuel material from UO2 pellet to U3O8 powder in an air atmosphere and reduced into UO2 in a hydrogen atmosphere subsequently. The volatile gaseous nuclide such as 3H,14C,Kr, I, Xe and semi-volatile fission products such as Mo, Tc, Ru and Te in oxide form can be released from spent fuel material and selective trapped in a special filter. The rare earth elements which have a large neutron absorption cross-section were also considered to remove from the spent fuel material by means of the dissolution of the oxide of rare earth elements with the carboxy-functionalized ionic liquid. The rest of spent fuel in UO2 will be convert to UC by thermal-carbon reduction reaction and refabricate to the new nuclear fuel in carbide form and burn in China Initiative Accelerator Driven System (CiADS).
Xuesong Yan, Lei Yang, Xunchao Zhang, Wenlong Zhan. Concept of an Accelerator-Driven Advanced Nuclear Energy System, Energies 2017, 10(7), 944;
 Hansoo Lee, Geun-IL Park, Jae-Won Lee, Kweon-Ho Kang, Jin-Mok Hur, Jeong-Guk Kim, Seungwoo Paek, In-Tae Kim, and IL-Je Cho. Current Status of Pyroprocessing Development at KAERI,Science and Technology of Nuclear Installations 2013 (2013), Article ID 343492, 11 pages