This post contains a summary of INFCIRC/549 reports by the countries that submit annual civilian plutonium declarations that reflect the status of civilian plutonium stocks as of 31 December 2020.

1. Japan (INFCIRC/549/Add.1-24) reported owning the total of 46.1 tons of plutonium, 8.9 tons of which is in Japan (the numbers in 2019 were 45.5 tons and 8.9 tons respectively). According to the Status Report on Plutonium Management in Japan - 2020 released in July 2021, out of the 37.2 tons of plutonium abroad, 21.805 tons are in the United Kingdom and 15.411 tons are in France.

2. Germany (INFCIRC/549/Add.2-24) reported having no separated plutonium in the country for the second year in a row. Germany does not report separated plutonium outside of the country. It is believed to be less than 1 ton.

3. Belgium (INFCIRC/549/Add.3-20) declared no separated plutonium in storage or at reprocessing plants and "not zero, but less than 50 kg" of separated plutonium in other categories. It reported that it had no foreign plutonium as of 31 December 2020.

4. Switzerland (INFCIRC/549/Add.4-25) reported having less than 2 kg of plutonium in the country (in the "located elsewhere" category). The number has not changed since 2016 (it was "less than 50 kg" in 2015).

5. France (INFCIRC/549/Add.5-25) reported having 95.0 tons of separated unirradiated plutonium in its custody. Of this amount, 15.6 tons belongs to foreign countries. It appears that almost all that plutonium - 15,411 kg - belongs to Japan. The amount of plutonium owned by France is 79.5 tons, an increase of 4.8 tonnes from previous year (74.7 tons).

6. The United States has not submitted its 2019 report. In its 2020 report (INFCIRC/549/Add.6-23) declared 49.4 tons of separated plutonium, of which 4.6 tons are in MOX fuel and 44.8 tons are "held elsewhere" (most of this material is believed to be in weapon components). This amount was reported to be 44.7 tons in 2018, but went back to 44.8 tons in 2019 (as indicated by the "previous year" number in the 2020 declaration). These changes appear to reflect changes in the accounting for the material - the amount reported as "disposed as waste" was 4.6 tons in 2018, but was reverted to 4.5 tons in 2020.

7. China has not has not submitted its 2017-2020 reports as of 24 October 2021. The last INFCIRC/549 report submitted to the IAEA showed 40.9 kg of separated plutonium as of 31 December 2016.

8. The United Kingdom (INFCIRC/549/Add.8-24) reported owning 116.1 tons of separated plutonium, an increase from 115.8 in 2018 (most likely the result of taking title of already separated Japan's plutonium). In addition to that, the United Kingdom stores 24.1 tons of foreign plutonium (of which 21.805 tons is owned by Japan).

9. Russia (NFCIRC/549/Add.9-23) reported owning 63.3 tons of civilian plutonium, an increase of 0.3 tons from 2019.

In addition to reporting plutonium stocks, some countries also submit data on their civilian HEU:

Germany reported 0.35 tonnes of HEU in research reactor fuel (an increase from 0.32 tonnes in 2019), 0.94 tonnes of HEU in irradiated research reactor fuel, and 0.01 tonnes in the category "HEU held elsewhere" (unchanged).

France declared 5319 kg of HEU (5373 kg in 2019), of which 3785 kg (3836 kg) is unirradiated material - 852 kg (930 kg) of HEU at fuel fabrication or reprocessing plants, 74 kg (51 kg) at civil reactor sites, 2859 kg (2855 kg) at various research facilities. Also declared are 1533 kg (1537 kg) of irradiated HEU - 79 kg (99 kg) at civil reactor sites and 1454 kg (1438 kg) in other locations.

The United Kingdom reported having 738 kg of HEU (734 kg in 2019). Of this amount, 601 kg is unirradiated HEU (598 in 2019): less than 1 kg of unirradiated HEU is stored at the enrichment plants, less than 1 kg is at civil reactor sites, 421 kg - at fuel fabrication facilities, and 180 kg - at other sites (417 kg and 181 kg respectively in 2019). Irradiated HEU is located at civil reactor sites (5 kg) and other sites (132 kg).

The government of Japan released The Status Report of Plutonium Management in Japan - 2020, which details its plutonium holdings. According to the report,

As of the end of 2020, the total amount of separated plutonium both managed within and outside of Japan was approximately 46.1 tons, approximately 8.9 tons of which was held domestically and the rest of approximately 37.2 tons was held abroad.

The amount of domestic storage was approximately 8.9 tons at the end of 2020, the same amount as in the previous year, since there was no domestic consumption or recovery of separated plutonium either.

Of the plutonium stored abroad, 15,411 kg are stored in France (15,435 in 2019) and 21,805 kg - in the United Kingdom (21,180 in 2019). The reprocessing of Japan's spent fuel held in France had been completed by the end of 2017. The change of the amount of plutonium in the United Kingdom appears to reflect the change of the classification of the 0.6 tonnes of the material, rather than a new reprocessing campaign. In 2019 this material was reported as being contained in spent fuel. According to the report,

the stockpile held abroad increased from 36.6 tons to approximately 37.2 tons by adding approximately 0.6 tons of plutonium uncounted as of the end of 2019 among the plutonium separated under the contract with U.K.

In 2019, Japan reported having a total of 45.5 tons of separated plutonium, of which 8.9 tons were held domestically.

Frank N. von Hippel

On June 24, 2021, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) voted to accept the recommendation of its staff to discontinue developing regulations for commercial reprocessing in the United States. The NRC Staff argued that making rules for reprocessing was not "cost-justified" since "no industry stakeholders indicated that they plan to submit an application to the NRC for a reprocessing facility in the foreseeable future" and, even looking ahead 10-20 years, there was "limited interest expressed or expected from potential applicants for reprocessing facilities, including advanced reactor designers, in the near-term use of reprocessed spent fuel." At the same time, entrenched interests within the Department of Energy (DOE) and Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and a segment of the nuclear industry are trying to keep alive decades-old hopes for reprocessing and plutonium-fueled reactors.

Learning the reprocessing lesson, again The NRC staff's work on developing regulatory guidance for US reprocessing was initiated sixteen years ago in response to Nevada's legal battle against Congress' imposition of a geological repository for spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste. In 2005, the Congressional Appropriations Committees instructed the Department of Energy (DOE), "Given the uncertainties surrounding the Yucca Mountain [radioactive waste repository] license application process...we provide $50,000,000...for the Department [of Energy] to develop a spent nuclear fuel recycling plan." The committees gave the DOE two years to select a site for a government-financed reprocessing plant and three years thereafter to initiate construction.

This Congressional directive reflected the enthusiasm for reprocessing of Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM), then chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, and his former staffer, Clay Sell, who had been appointed Deputy Secretary of Energy in the administration of the second President Bush. In his 2004 memoir, A Brighter Tomorrow: Fulfilling the Promise of Nuclear Energy, Senator Domenici waxed almost lyrical about a 1998 tour he had been given of France's reprocessing plant at La Hague, concluding, "We must learn lessons from France's nuclear program" (pp. 161-163).

In 2006, Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists and the current author were informed by the then chair and ranking minority member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development that DOE had told them that reprocessing would be less costly than dry cask storage. At the time, the actual cost of reprocessing was ten times higher than that for dry-cask storage.

With the Republicans' loss of control of Congress in the 2006 election, the pressure on DOE to reprocess abated. Industry continued to press the NRC to develop regulations, however. In 2011, France's government-owned fuel-cycle company, AREVA, wrote to the NRC,

"Assuming a final [NRC] rule in 20l5...projections suggest that construction [of an AREVA reprocessing plant in the US] could begin as early as 2020, with receipt of used fuel in 2025, and initial fuel treatment in 2030. Licensing by the NRC is on the critical path."

GE-Hitachi wrote similarly

"to express the continuing commitment of General Electric-Hitachi (GEH) to developing our Power Reactor lnnovative Small Modular (PRISM)/Advanced Recycling Center (ARC) technology."

AREVA went bankrupt in 2016, and was down-sized and restructured under a new name, Orano. GE-Hitachi was unable to find customers for its liquid-sodium-cooled PRISM reactor.

The dream of sodium-cooled reactors refused to die, however. Lowell Wood, a protégé of Edward Teller, who had driven the development of US thermonuclear weapons, convinced Bill Gates that "traveling-wave" sodium-cooled reactors could revive nuclear power. Gates founded a company, Terrapower to foster the development of these reactors.

After the traveling-wave concept proved to be infeasible, Terrapower shifted to promoting sodium-cooled plutonium-breeder reactors of the type that the US Atomic Energy Commission and other leading nuclear-energy establishments around the world had developed in the 1960s and 1970s. This earlier effort had collapsed as global nuclear capacity plateaued after 1990 due to cost and safety concerns. Sodium-cooled fast-neutron reactors had proven to be more costly and much less reliable than light-water reactors and the effort to commercialize them failed despite the expenditure of about $100 billion on research, development and demonstrations worldwide. The program's most important legacy was its facilitation of nuclear-weapon proliferation to India (see, for example, Frank von Hippel, Masafumi Takubo and Jungmin Kang, Plutonium: How Nuclear Power's Dream Fuel Became a Nightmare (Springer, 2019)).

Nuclear Idaho The persistence of US interest in reprocessing comes in large part from Idaho National Laboratory (INL), the center since the 1960s and 1970s of US efforts to develop sodium-cooled plutonium breeder reactors. INL has remained enamoured with its concept of Integral Fast Reactor complexes in which groups of sodium-cooled plutonium-breeder reactors would have their own "pyroprocessing" plants (INL's preferred reprocessing technology) onsite to recycle plutonium from their spent fuel into fresh fuel. INL has sustained its pyroprocessing program for three decades by using it to convert the spent fuel of its shutdown Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR II) into a stable waste form suitable for disposal in a deep-underground radioactive waste repository. The EBR II fuel could not be disposed directly in a spent fuel repository because it contains liquid sodium to conduct heat from between the fuel "meat" and cladding. Sodium burns on contact with air or water. INL's pyroprocessing program has, however, suffered huge cost overruns and schedule slippages, and has failed in its mission to produce stable radioactive waste forms.

Idaho's Republican Senators took the lead in the effort to get DOE funding to promote the demonstration of sodium-cooled reactors. They were joined by an influential group of Senate Democrats who had become convinced that a revival of nuclear power would be necessary to achieve the goal of phasing out fossil fuels. Together, the bipartisan group managed to pass the Nuclear Energy Innovations Capabilities Act of 2017 which mandated that DOE pursue the construction of a "versatile reactor-based fast neutron source" and bring it into operation by 2025.

Under the Trump Administration, DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy, led by a former INL staffer, decided to contract with Terrapower and GE-Hitachi to construct a multi-billion dollar, plutonium-fueled "Versatile Test Reactor" (VTR) at INL to test fuels and materials for fast-neutron reactors. It also initiated a cost-sharing arrangement with Terrapower and GE-Hitachi for the construction of a "Natrium" demonstration power reactor (natrium is Latin for sodium). The designs of both reactors are based on the PRISM reactor, whose design is based in turn on that of the EBR II, which operated at INL from 1964-94. Congress has thus far only supplied the first tranches of funding for these efforts.

The INL fuel design that GE-Hitachi and Terrapower have adopted must be reprocessed to create a stable waste form. On May 19, 2021, DOE announced a $40 million initiative to "limit the amount of waste produced from advanced nuclear reactors" - code for reprocessing - and, on June 28, 2021, it announced a cost-sharing agreement under which Argonne National Laboratory is to transfer pyroprocessing technology for separating plutonium from spent nuclear fuel to Oklo, a $25-million startup that proposes to mass-produce potassium-cooled, 1.5 megawatt fast-neutron microreactors, which would also use the INL fuel design.

In parallel, in Canada, Moltex, a UK startup, proposes to pyroprocess spent Canadian nuclear fuel to obtain plutonium to fuel small molten-salt-cooled fast-neutron reactors, and to make Canada a hub for exporting these reactors and their small pyroprocessing plants. Canada's Ministry of Natural Resources has announced a CAD50.5 million grant in support the development of this proposal. A group of senior US nonproliferation experts wrote to Canada's government requesting a non-proliferation and waste-management review of Moltex's proposal. A similar request for a nonproliferation review of DOE's promotion of reprocessing has been submitted to the Biden Administration.

Reprocessing is much more costly than spent-fuel storage and direct disposal. Since nuclear energy is already struggling economically to compete with renewables, making it still more costly will do it no favors. And DOE's promotion of pyroprocessing could once again legitimize reprocessing R&D in countries seeking a nuclear-weapon option.

Kazakhstan's National Nuclear Center reported that it completed the process of downblending the HEU fuel of the IGR uranium-graphite research reactor. On 23 April 2021, the material was delivered to the reactor site in Kurchatov, where it was placed in storage. Fresh HEU fuel was downblended at the Ulba Metallurgical Plant.

The IGR reactor is expected to be decomissoned. There is still some irradiated HEU fuel stored at the reactor site.

By Hui Zhang

Figure 1: The demo reprocessing and MOX facilities under construction at Jinta, Gansu. Satellite image from 1 March 2020 (Coordinates: 40.333750, 98.494167). Credit: DigitalGlobe. Note that significant construction activities for reprocessing facility project II likely started after December 2020. This March 2020 image just shows related ground preparations.

Commercial bidding and purchase documents and other accounts suggest China is likely to start construction of a second spent fuel reprocessing plant of the same capacity and at the same site as its first such plant, the CNNC Gansu Nuclear Technology Industrial Park in Jinta, Gansu province.

Since 2015, China has been constructing a civilian "demonstration" reprocessing plant for spent light-water reactor fuel, with a capacity of 200 tons per year (tons of Heavy Metal, tHM/year). The construction activities and equipment purchases suggest that this first plant (Project I) could complete its civil engineering stage and begin equipment installment in late 2020. Project 1 is expected to be operational in 2025. The start of work on the second reprocessing plant (Project II) in late 2020 or early 2021 suggests that it could be commissioned before 2030.

In contrast to the launch of construction of Project I, there have been no official statements or news coverage so far concerning this new facility. There have been a number of announcements, however, including bid requests for various studies and services for "spent fuel demonstration reprocessing plant project II":

• Jiangsu Shentong company, an equipment supplier, stated in a report dated 18 November 2019 that the China National Nuclear Corporation planned to build two 200 tHM/year reprocessing plants according to CNNC's 2012 "Long Teng 2020" (Dragon Soars 2020) technology innovation plan.
• Bid for investigation of the impact of Project II on the environment and the adjacent community to be completed by 28 February 2021(posted on 5 November 2020).
• Bid for supplementary investigation of average and extreme weather conditions in the Project II area for completion by 28 February 2021 (posted on 5 November 2020).
• Bid for analysis of the environmental noise around the site of Project II, with completion required before 30 December 2020 (posted on 2 November 2020).
• Bid for statistical analysis of meteorological parameters required for the design of the heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning system for Project II (posted on 9 December 2020).
• Bid for design of auxiliary facilities for Project II with a bidding period of 28 February 2021 to 5 March 2021 (posted on 28 February 2021).

Satellite images suggest that, as of November 2019 the buildings hosting spent fuel reception pools for the first demonstration reprocessing plant seem to have been finished and the high stack of the first reprocessing plant is also complete. The main processing buildings were under construction. The company started to order equipment for the reprocessing line in the same period. In December 2019, CNNC called for a bid for a fluidized-bed facility for the reprocessing plant to be received by September 2020. In January 2020, the company finished the bidding process for procurement of a nitrogen oxide exhaust gas treatment system.

Since 2018 CNNC has also been building a demonstration mixed uranium-plutonium oxide (MOX) fuel fabrication line with a capacity of 20 tons/year near the demonstration reprocessing plant. In 2019, the company started to order equipment for the MOX fabrication line. The civil engineering stage was expected to be completed and equipment installation started in 2020, with the plant to be commissioned by 2025.

The two 200 tHM/year per year reprocessing plants, operating at 50% capacity, and the 20 tons per year MOX plant could support the plutonium needs (about 2 tons of plutonium) of China's two CFR600 fast reactors under construction at Xiapu, Fujian Province. Construction on these reactors started in December 2017 and December 2020, and they are planned to be operational in 2023 and 2026 respectively. The first CFR600 will commence operating with HEU fuel rather than MOX; Russia's TVEL contracted in 2019 to supply the initial HEU core and reloads for seven years. It is currently unclear if the second reactor also will start out with HEU fuel or operate only with domestic MOX fuel.

Based on the MOX fuel requirements of Russia's prototype BN800 fast reactor (an initial core of 15.8 tons of MOX with 20.5% plutonium content), each CFR600 could require an initial core of about 10 tons of MOX fuel. Assuming the CFR600 MOX fuel contains about 20% plutonium, the initial MOX core would require about 2 tons of plutonium. The 200 tons of spent light water reactor fuel processed annually by each of the reprocessing plants that are under construction would also contain about 2 tons of plutonium. Operating at a capacity of 20 tons per year the demonstration MoX plant could produce these two initial cores in a year. Thereafter, each CFR600 may require about 5.5 tons per year of MOX, containing about 1 ton of plutonium (assuming each has a power of 1500 MWt, and average burnup of 80 Mwt-day/kgHM, and a capacity factor of about 80%).

By Piet de Klerk

In the 1970s Frits Veerman (1944-2021) was a young professional photographer in Amsterdam. He was the first to blow the whistle on what was to become the most prominent nuclear technology smuggling ring in history, but was punished for his honest and courageous action. Veerman died a few weeks ago.

At the time Veerman worked at the consultancy FDO (which stands for Fysisch-Dynamisch Onderzoek), part of the Stork concern. One of FDO's large clients was UCN (Ultra Centrifuge Netherlands), for which it researched the metallurgical aspects of gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment. In May 1972 a new colleague arrived: Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani metallurgist who had studied in Germany and the Netherlands and who had done his PhD in Leuven, Belgium.

Veerman got along well with his new Pakistani colleague, the two shared an office. Khan was an attentive, easy going young man with a ready smile. After a while Veerman started to join Khan for dinner from time to time at his home in Zwanenburg, near Schiphol Airport, where he met Khan's wife Hendrina and their two daughters.

Veerman's new colleague was sent to the UCN plant in Almelo, because Khan's expertise was wanted. Pretty quickly Khan spent a lot of time in Almelo and despite his low clearance he didn't spend his time only in his designated office, but managed to roam around the facility, helping UCN colleagues with their problems.

Veerman started to be somewhat suspicious in 1973, but it was only in mid-1975 that alarm bells went off. He saw highly classified drawings in Khan's house - against all rules. Veerman was asked by Khan to photograph those classified centrifuge drawings before the originals went back to the plant (which Veerman refused). Moreover he heard Khan discuss sensitive centrifuge matters by telephone with his old professor in Leuven. Veerman was concerned and informed his superiors at FDO and other relevant players. The net result of his efforts was that he was told to keep his mouth shut.

The A.Q. Khan story is well known: Khan's letters, prompted by the Indian explosion in May 1974, to Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto - who had instructed Pakistani scientists to work on nuclear weapons in 1972; his efforts to collect as much information about centrifuges as possible in the course of 1975; his return to Pakistan, taking control after a while of the Pakistani enrichment efforts, and building the Kahuta enrichment plant that supplied the highly enriched uranium for the Pakistani nuclear tests in 1998.

Veerman was not the only one who became suspicious. In the second half of 1975 several incidents came to light: an order in the UK for frequency converters used for the motors that drive centrifuges, an order in France from the Pakistani embassy in Brussels clearly based on an UCN document, and Khan's suspicious behaviour at a nuclear exhibition in Basel. But Veerman was the first whistle-blower in the Khan case and he was treated the worst.

Veerman and Khan carried on a correspondence after Khan's return to Pakistan in late 1975. Khan's letters included technical questions about classified matters. When Veerman showed one of these letters to his superiors he was told to burn it. In 1978 he was fired.

In 1981 the A.Q. Khan letter resurfaced and played a pivotal role in the Amsterdam court case against Khan. The court sentenced Khan to four years in prison, but that sentence was later annulled for formal reasons: the summons had never reached the accused. The Netherlands Government had done what it could to reach Khan, had gone to his house, where the doorbell wasn't answered, had then invoked the assistance of the Pakistani Foreign Ministry, which said 'no problem', accepted the summons and then probably dropped the document in the waste paper basket.

Frits Veerman's role was one of the many pieces of the Khan Affair, especially if we define the Khan Affair not only as Khan's key part in the Pakistani nuclear weapons programme, but include also his central part in the smuggling ring that offered centrifuge technology to Iran, Iraq, Libya and North Korea - until his enterprise came crashing down in 2003. But Veerman's role is important because he took classification and non-proliferation rules seriously and acted on his suspicions in an honest and courageous way.

Veerman was starting to be recognized for his actions when the Whistleblowers Authority - a Dutch institution that was created in 2016 - came to the conclusion that Veerman was unfairly treated at the time, as it considered it likely that whistleblowing was the reason for firing him in 1978. And he was at the center of the documentary Under the Spell of the Bomb.

It is likely that commercial interests explain to a large extent why Veerman's s efforts in the 1970s were ignored, but what else played a role is unclear. There are still many unanswered questions in the Khan Affair, related to events in the Netherlands, the United States, Pakistan and elsewhere. Getting to the bottom of them would help make non-proliferation policy more effective.

Photo: Transparency International Netherlands

The MSZ Plant in Electrostal, near Moscow (part of the TVEL division of Rosatom), set up a production line that will manufacture uranium fuel for China's CFR-600 fast neutron reactor. According to the fuel supply contact that was signed in December 2018, TVEL will provide fuel for the initial load and then for reloads during first seven years of CFR-600 operation. The production line will also manufacture fuel for Russia's BN-600 reactor and for China's CEFR reactor. The first shipment of CFR-600 fuel is expected in 2023, when the reactor is expected to begin operations.

While the official sources do not specify the level of enrichment of uranium in fuel, at least some of it will contain HEU. Russia's BN-600 reactor uses uranium fuel with three levels of enrichment - 17%, 21%, and 26%. It was reported earlier that CEFR fuel contains uranium with 64.4% enrichment. It is likely that CFR-600 will use HEU in some of its fuel elements as well, with enrichment similar to that of BN-600.

Russia has already supplied fuel for the CEFR reactor, which was reloaded in 2020. That fuel was also manufactured by MSZ, although at a different production line.

It appears that China plans to switch CFR-600 to plutonium-based fuel after 2030. It planned to begin irradiation of MOX fuel assemblies in CEFR in 2018 (or even in 2015), but it appears that the plan has been reconsidered.

In December 2020, China began construction of a second CFR-600 reactor, which is expected to begin operations in 2026. At this point it is not clear whether the reactor will start with HEU fuel and whether Russia will supply fuel for it as well.

Plutonium for the CFR-600 program is likely to be separated at two reprocessing plants that are currently under construction at Jinta, located near Jiuquan city of Gansu province. Construction of the first plant with the capacity of 200 MTHM/year began in 2015. A second 200 MTHM/year plant (Project II) appears to have begun in the late 2020 or early 2021. Jinta is also the site of a MOX fuel fabrication facility with the projected capacity of 20 MT of fuel per year. This combination of two reprocessing plants and a MOX facility appears to be sufficient to support operations of two CFR-600 reactors when they switch to MOX fuel.

Commercial satellite imagery obtained by the IPFM shows significant new construction at the Dimona site in Israel, officially known as the Negev Nuclear Research Center. The imagery was acquired by the SuperView-1 (SV-1) satellite on Monday, 4 January 2021. The construction site is located in the immediate vicinity of the buildings that house the nuclear reactor and the reprocessing plant (to the south-west from the buildings, around the point with coordinates 31.000, 35.143). It can be seen on the satellite image posted below.

SuperView-1 image from 4 January 2021 at 2-meter resolution. Credit: SpaceWill

The exact date the construction began is uncertain. The last satellite image available from Google Earth, which was obtained in September 2011, does not show any activity at the site. The first signs of construction are visible on an image available from the HERE WeGo service (the date of that image is unknown).

The 2021 image shows that the construction has expanded and appears to be actively underway with multiple construction vehicles present. At this stage, the construction appears to be centered around a large-scale excavation area with the size of about 140 meters by 50 meters. The purpose of this construction is unknown.

Satellite images of the Negev Nuclear Research Center. Left: Google Maps, September 2011, right: HERE WeGo, date unknown.

UPDATE 2/19/2021: The construction apparently began in late 2018 or early 2019 (via Samir @obretix).

China's Experimental Fast Reactor (CEFR) operated by the China Atomic Energy Institute (CAIE) has started what was described as "high-power operations," as quoted in a World Nuclear News Report.

The reactor, which is designed to operate with "65MW thermal power and 20MW experimental generation power", first reached criticality in July 2010 and it was connected to the grid in July 2011. In 2014, it operated at full power for 144 hours (72 hours according to a different source). It appears that CEFR was shut down after that to be restarted and connected to the grid for the second time in October 2015, at 20% nominal power.

According to a CNNC report, the reactor was shut down at some point after completing the low-power test phase. It was restarted on 19 June 2020 "for high-power operations." About 40 days of tests appear to have concluded with a "100 percent power manual emergency shutdown test," conducted on 31 July 2021. After that the reactor entered shutdown for its first refueling and maintenance.

The reactor was restarted again on 19 January 2021 and re-connected to the grid on 15 February 2021. It appears that this time CEFR entered the "power test phase" of the tests.

CEFR operates with HEU fuel (64.4% HEU) supplied by Russia. The most recent shipment of fuel took place in July 2019.

China started construction of the second breeder reactor of the CFR-600 type at the site at Xiapu, Fujian province, where it is building the first CFR-600 unit. Construction of the first unit began in December 2017. The first unit is expected to begin operations in 2023, which suggests that the second one will be operational in 2026.

The upcoming construction was first reported by Zhang Hui of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University - See "CNNC Embarks on Second CFR-600," Nuclear Intelligence Weekly, 22 May 2020 and Hui Zhang, "China is speeding up its plutonium recycling programs," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 76:4, 210-216.