This article examines the consequences of a significant spent fuel management decision or event in the United States, South Korea and Taiwan. For the United States, it is the financial impact of the Department of Energy’s inability to take possession of spent fuel from commercial nuclear power companies beginning in 1998 as directed by Congress. For South Korea, it is the potential financial and socioeconomic impact of the successful construction, licensing and operation of a low and intermediate level waste disposal facility on the siting of a spent fuel/high level waste repository. For Taiwan, it is the operational impact of the Kuosheng 1 reactor running out of space in its spent fuel pool. From these, it draws six broad lessons other countries new to, or preparing for, nuclear energy production might take from these experiences. These include conservative planning, treating the back-end of the fuel cycle holistically and building trust through a step-by-step approach to waste disposal.

When a new nuclear fuel is developed, irradiation test needs to be carried out in the research reactor to analyze the performance of the new nuclear fuel. It is necessary to attach sensors in the fuel rod and connect them with instrumentation cables to check the performance of the nuclear fuel during the burn up test in the test loop. A thermocouple is installed at the center of the fuel rod to check the centerline temperature of a fuel rod during the irradiation test. Therefore, A hole needs to be made at the center of a fuel pellet to put the thermocouple. However, it is difficult to make a small fine hole on the sintered UO2 pellet with a simple drilling machine, because the hardness and density of a sintered UO2 pellet are very high. In this study, an instrumented fuel rod mock-up was fabricated using an automated precise drilling machine. Four sintered alumina were drilled off and assembled into the zircaloy tube and a thermocouple was instrumented in the fuel rod mock-up. Sealing of an instrumented fuel rod mock-up was performed in the following two methods. It is sealing of similar metals perform by welding method, and sealing of dissimilar metals perform by swagelok method.