NEW DELHI, June 27 (Xinhua) -- India has adopted a "closed fuel cycle" where spent nuclear fuel is regarded as a material of resource, the country's Minister of Atomic Energy Jitendra Singh said Thursday.
The nuclear waste management practices are at par with international practices following the guidelines of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), he added.
"Closed fuel cycle aims at reprocessing of spent fuel for recovery of uranium and plutonium and recycling them back to the reactor as fuel. This finally leads to a very small percentage of residual material present in spent nuclear fuel requiring their management as radioactive waste," Singh said in response to a question in parliament's Upper House 'Rajya Sabha'.
He also stated that the high-level radioactive waste also contained many useful isotopes like 'Caesium-137', 'Strontium-90', 'Ruthenium-106' etc.
With the advent of new technologies based on the partitioning of waste, the emphasis is accorded to the separation and recovery of these useful radio-isotopes so as to make use of the waste for various societal applications.
Comprehensive radioactive waste management is established taking into account the operational capability for the management of radioactive waste and an independent regulatory capability for its overview.
