They recently built an R&D-scale PUREX plant on the site of a weapons complex. The most likely "story" is that it started operating. >The Jiuquan Atomic Energy

They recently built an R&D-scale PUREX plant on the site of a weapons complex. The most likely "story" is that it started operating. >The Jiuquan Atomic Energy Complex (Plant 404) is centered on a 400-500MW light water graphite reactor [LWGR] fueled with natural Uranium. The facility includes a pilot plutonium reprocessing plant and a arge-scale reprocessing plant with a capacity of 300-400kg Pu/yr (both use PUREX method). It also includes a Nuclear Fuel Processing Plant for refining plutonium into weapons-usable metals. http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/china/jiuquan.htm http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/china/jiuquan.htm >The small reprocessing plant in Gansu was completed about six years ago, but Chinese oversight agencies have not yet permitted it to separate any plutonium—as of last month, just two fuel assemblies have been dissolved in the nitric acid tank at the plant. Full-scale operation is not expected before 2012. http://carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=41969 http://carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&... More about PUREX, reprocessing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing http://www.inl.gov/technicalpublications/KeyResults.aspx?key=20659 http://www.inl.gov/technicalpublications/KeyResults.aspx?key... China has a long-term vision (not really making progress) of closed fuel cycles based on fast breeder reactors. This is the state media reference to "60-fold increase in uranium usage", "3,000 year uranium supply". Since a fast reactor can't burn through fuel entirely in one go (it will fall apart), one of the requirements of a closed fuel cycle is reprocessing: fuel has to be removed from a reactor and re-fabricated. Certain waste products need to be removed, and pure plutonium* isolated for new fuel (this is a chemical separation). *(Not in every reprocessing method. COEX (mentioned in the Carnege Endowment article, where the French are trying to persuade China to adopt it) co-extracts plutonium with uranium. The pyroprocessing method developed at Argonne (US national lab) co-extracts plutonium with every trans-uranic, so that the resulting fuel is essentially unusable as weapons. China is pursuing PUREX.)