Location: DE - Germany
Modeled is the operation of a plant fabricating UO2 fuel for light water nuclear reactors (PWR and BWR), with no MOX (mixed oxides), no RepU (reprocessed fuel), and no HEU (highly enriched uranium from warheads) fuel elements. Hence the radioactive emissions (and spectrum) as well as the radioactive solid waste may have been somewhat underestimated. Data for the operation of a nuclear fuel fabrication facility are relatively old but emissions to water are complete for a US plant. Radioactive emissions to air and water have been taken or derived from two commercial German facilities: both (one operational, the other closed) exhibit emissions per unit of product fuel much lower than data published in the 1980s. An average value of the two plants is used. Zirconium for cladding is modelled as chromium, for lack of complete information on its metallurgical process; the uncertainty value reflects only the amount. This module is linked with one enrichment module with specific characteristics for the mix or enrichment processes and electricity supply mix; hence, before using the cumulated results of this module the conditions for enrichment should be verified.
[The full documentation of this dataset was originally provided in the corresponding ecoinvent report from the Swiss Centre for Life Cycle Inventories, which is accessible for free to guests and users of ecoinvent version 2 (https://www.ecoinvent.org/login-databases.html). The dataset may subsequently have been subjected to central changes to the database, as described in the respective change report for each new release.]
Undefined unit processes (UPRs) are the unlinked, multi-product activity datasets that form the basis for all of the system models available in the ecoinvent database. This is the way the datasets are obtained and entered into the database by the data providers. These activity datasets are useful for investigating the environmental impacts of a specific activity (gate-to-gate), without regard to its upstream or downstream impacts.
