For one-year efforts, the first VVER spent fuel dry storage canister in the world, manufactured by Apollo, a China local enterprise, was shipped to Tianwan site after a series of key performance testing such as stress test and helium leak test. The manufacturing director of Orano, who used to doubt about Apollo’s manufacturing capabilities, came to the delivery ceremony and confirmed that the quality of the first Apollo container can compete with Hitachi’s same kind of product.
Up to now, Apollo has been awarded orders for 35 containers from both CGN and CNNC, including 21 subcontracting contracts, 10 localized ones, and 4 independent ones.
However, Apollo is not satisfied to merely produce “trash cans”. As the deputy general manager, Xia Jingling said he is worried about the current status of spent fuel treatment in China. After inspecting his partners, he chose Orano instead of Holtec for cooperation because Holtec fears of Chinese learning ability, while Orano maters a complete spent fuel reprocessing system. “It is only a matter of expediency to temporarily put spent fuel in the canister. What is more important is to upgrade China’s own spent fuel reprocessing capacity.” Xia Jingling stressed.
In April 2016, China National Development and Reform Commission and National Energy Administration issued the “Energy Technology Revolution Innovation Action Plan (2016-2030)”, “Spent Fuel Reprocessing and High-level Waste Treatment and Disposal Technology Innovation” was listed as one of the 15 key tasks. But the actual execution has faced many difficulties. The $12 billion spent fuel reprocessing plant that China and France intend to cooperate also seems to be “out of date” because of the site selection.
At the moment when the whole world tends to suspend the approval of new nuclear power projects, it is not known that if the spent fuel reprocessing is still holding a great potential for prospering.
