A CROSS the world there is a renewed interest in the prospects of nuclear energy to help address concerns with carbon dioxide emissions and energy security. Whilst events at Fukushima are causing some countries to reconsider the role of nuclear, there is still likely to be a major expansion in the use of nuclear energy over the next few decades and a consequent build-up of spent nuclear fuel in storage. Typically, 97% of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) can be recovered and recycled into new fuels. This process, known as reprocessing, has been widely used over the last 60 years to recover uranium (U) and plutonium (Pu), the reusable actinide elements. However, with concerns around Pu proliferation, the costs of reprocessing (compared to interim storage) and the wastes generated, reprocessing at the commercial scale is currently only undertaken in the UK, France and Japan. This has led to the situation where approximately 250,000 t of SNF are currently in stores around the world, a figure that could rise to 1.25m t by 2100 if the expected new build of nuclear power plants happens. Eventually, decisions must be taken and these stored fuels must be reprocessed or disposed of in geological repositories designed for high-level radioactive wastes. Internationally, there is now wide interest in the development of sustainable nuclear fuel cycles which would use generation IV reactors that utilise U and Pu fuels far more efficiently than current thermal (generation III) reactors and can also burn the transuranic actinides (Pu, neptunium (Np); americium (Am); and curium (Cm)) that pose difficult problems for nuclear waste repositories. To deal with the stocks of SNF in storage and to allow this transition towards sustainability, significant changes Robin Taylor highlights the latest advances in nuclear fuel recycling Pu is always intimately diluted with U to reduce proliferation risks and intensifying the process to reduce costs and wastes generated. Some approaches are far more innovative, for instance a process that extracts all actinides (U – Cm) together in a group, and some lines of research move away from the dominant aqueous separation technologies, looking at whether ionic liquids, molten chloride salts or volatile fluorides could be used. Currently, nuclear fuel reprocessing at the commercial scale uses the well-known Plutonium-Uranium Extraction (Purex) process to recover U and Pu products. First developed in the US in the late 1940s, this is a hydrometallurgical process in which SNF is initially dissolved in refluxing nitric acid and then solvent extraction (SX) is used to extract U and Pu from the fission product containing nitric acid solution into a kerosene Fuelling the coming era