Sigma: The next generation of uranium enrichment technology

RIVAROLA M.; FLORIDO, P.; BRASNAROF, D.; BERGALLO, J.; JUANICO; KYU, K.; GONZÁLEZ J.; DAVERIO, H.

Buenos Aires

Congreso; Symposium on Nuclear Energy: Challenges and Realities in Latin America; 2001

Latin American Section of the American Nuclear Society

Even though it had been spent a great amount of money in research and development of new enrichment technologies, the final answer about the cheapest way to separate the light isotope of Uranium has not been found yet.Nowadays the enrichment market is passing through a critical point due to several reasons: the bigger production plants are in its lasts operation years, the expected new cheap technology has not arrived yet and the governments are cutting their support for the huge investment necessary in order to build the new generation of enrichment plants. Even when there is an overcapacity of enrichment services, the market is behaving as it were over-demanding. The major competitors are taking credit of the military stocks and they are involved in a wild fight to gain positions in the control of the uranium enrichment market, especially regarding the promise of resurgence of the nuclear energy in the next few years.In this scenario, it is still not clear which is going to be the leading technology for the near future. The Gaseous Diffusion has been the most important technology since the dawn of the nuclear industry and showed a great robustness and reliability, but after 50 years of continuous operation it become too expensive and obsolete. Otherwise, the Atomic Vapor Laser Technologies (AVLIS), and its non-US related technologies (SILVA, etc.), which were considered as the high-tech promise, have demonstrated success just for lab scale but not for industrial scale production, not before having wasted vast amounts of R&D founds. The Ultra Centrifuge (UC) Technology has been considered, up to now, the most economical solution because of its low electrical consumption. This assertion does not regard the huge capital costs involved in the construction of the UC plants, in a world moving toward higher discount rates. Furthermore, it has not been took into account the tremendous maintenance cost due to high failure rates. In fact, several countries slowed down or cancelled its UC projects. Moreover, there is an international concern about the subsidization of Separative Work Units (SWU) produced by UC. As an answer to this state of affairs, Argentinean designers have developed a new technology based on the proved Gaseous Diffusion Technology. This technology overcomes the problems of the enrichment known technologies, lessening the SWU cost to one half of its actual level. This new concept is called SIGMA (Separación Isotópica Gaseosa por Métodos Avanzados ? Gaseous Isotope Separation using Advanced Methods). The SIGMA technology does not need any kind of subsidy to be competitive, offering a balanced cost breakdown that could be afforded by any private corporation, at market discount rates.In this paper, the authors analyze the problems and characteristics of the actual enrichment market, showing how the SIGMA technology could become the dominant enrichment technology in the next few years.