With the USA's cancellation of the Yucca Mountain project, it seems to have turned away from the once-through fuel cycle, and toward reprocessing and recycling of spent nuclear fuel. There are significant environmental and resource benefits of doing so, although many technical challenges remain. The Fukushima accident has brought into question the way used nuclear fuel is handled at the reactor site (see WEI June 2011 pp. 10-11) but so far the issue has largely been one of whether the fuel should be removed more quickly from the reactor site and put into centralised storage. The wider issue, of course, is what happens to the used fuel subsequently. If we take the three countries whose nuclear programmes have been most adversely affected by Fukushima, namely Japan, Germany and Switzerland, each has always been actively involved in reprocessing used fuel and subsequently the use of recycled uranium and/ or Plutonium in reactors.
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