Yucca Mountain News Clips
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
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New York Times
February 14, 2006
Big Question Marks on Nuclear Waste Facility
By Matthew L. Wald
WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 — The Energy Department no longer has an estimate of when it can open the nuclear waste repository that it wants to build at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, and it may never have an accurate prediction of the cost, the energy secretary said on Monday.
The secretary, Samuel W. Bodman, said at a nuclear power industry conference that his department was redoing research and design for Yucca, which was supposed to start accepting civilian power-plant waste in 1998. But it is a first-of-a-kind project, making cost estimates difficult, he said, and the best that the department may be able to do is publish an estimate with a very wide range of error.
Last week the deputy energy secretary, Clay Sell, hinted for the first time that the money that the Energy Department had been collecting from the nuclear utilities since the 1980's might not be enough to pay for the project; the last published cost estimate was $60 billion, in 2001. The last date given for its planned opening, provided a year ago, was 2012. The department is facing lawsuits from utilities that want to recover extra costs created by the delay.
Mr. Bodman spoke Monday to hundreds of nuclear industry executives at a conference organized by Platts, an energy information division of McGraw-Hill. Other speakers said that various companies were considering building as many as 16 new reactors soon; none have been ordered in this country since the 1970's.
A lawyer in the audience asked how the industry could build new plants without assurances of a plan for the waste, as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires.
Mr. Bodman did not answer, but instead began describing the problems of the Yucca project.
For one, he said, government scientists and their commercial contractors were trying to cope with research work that was done poorly by the United States Geological Survey. Another problem is a court decision that forced the Environmental Protection Agency to publish standards governing leakage of radioactive waste for one million years, he said; initially the Energy Department had planned on a timeline of 10,000 years.
In addition, he said, the project managers recently decided that they had to space the wastes more widely to prevent temperature inside the mountain from reaching the boiling point, because the effects of steam are more difficult to predict.
"There are problems with the U.S. Geological Survey work that was done, there are problems with the E.P.A. standards that are there, there are problems with the efforts of the Department of Energy. There's plenty of blame to go around," Mr. Bodman said.
His comments came more than six years after the Energy Department issued a "viability assessment" asserting that the mountain could hold waste from power plants and nuclear weapons plants, and two years after the department had planned to submit an application to get a license for the project.
Mr. Bodman had come to talk mostly about the Bush administration's new Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, a plan that includes reprocessing nuclear wastes to reduce their volume and toxicity. Despite a spirited description of the program, he got no questions on that subject.
Some in the industry said, though, that the partnership introduced a new complication for Yucca. If used reactor fuel were put through a factory to recover reusable parts, as the proposal calls for, the new wastes could not be buried at Yucca until the project was reanalyzed, they said.
Another complication is that the department recently told utilities that they should ship fuel to Yucca in containers that could go directly into the mountain for burial. But some of the waste is now packaged in other kinds of containers, in locations where the reactors have been torn down, which means there is no easy way to repackage the materials.
Other nuclear professionals present, including the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Nils J. Diaz, predicted that the nation would shift to a system of above-ground interim storage and perhaps the solution called for in the nuclear partnership: breaking up old nuclear fuel to recover reusable materials. But this could help spread material useful in nuclear weapons.
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Platts
February 13, 2006
NEI wants nuclear waste fee to remain at current level
Washington (Platts)--13Feb2006
The nuclear industry would like Congress to freeze the nuclear waste fee at its current level of 1 mill per kilowatt-hour of nuclear-generated electricity sold, Steve Kraft, the Nuclear Energy Institute's (NEI) director of waste management, said yesterday. Kraft's comment came in an address to the staff of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (Naruc) nuclear issues subcommittee as Naruc kicked off its winter meeting in Washington, D.C. The industry has reviewed its policies regarding the management of utility spent reactor fuel, Kraft said, adding that industry doesn't want to ever see the fee increased. Congress put the fee in place in 1983 to bankroll DOE's waste program. Industry also sees a need to develop advanced technologies so the nuclear fuel cycle can be closed when the technologies are mature enough that the economics and environmental benefits from their use can be realized, he said. However, Kraft also stressed that the development of advanced reprocessing technologies does not obviate the need for the repository DOE plans to build at Yucca Mountain, Nev.
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KSL-TV
February 14, 2006
Feds License Nuke-Waste Project in Utah's West Desert
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- A federal agency has licensed Private Fuel Storage to stockpile nuclear waste on an American Indian reservation about 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.
Yet other legal and bureaucratic obstacles still confront Private Fuel Storage, a group of utilities that own nuclear power plants.
Utah is asking a federal appeals court to overturn the license that was authorized in September and issued Monday by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. A state lawyer said Private Fuel Storage still needs a right of way from the Bureau of Land Management; approval from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and a permit from the federal Surface Transportation Board if it decides to build a rail line to the Skull Valley reservation.
"This is a Pyrrhic victory for PFS -- just a piece of paper," Denise Chancellor, an assistant state attorney general, said Tuesday.
PFS also needs to show the Nuclear Regulatory Commission it has enough money to build the repository for spent uranium fuel rods and, with the departure of several of eight original members, the financing could be threadbare, Chancellor said.
PFS spokeswoman Sue Martin, who wasn't immediately available for comment Tuesday, has said the consortium can recruit other members.
Utah leaders say a new wilderness area cuts off the only practical route for a rail spur delivering heavy steel casks of spent fuel rods down the length of Skull Valley to the Goshute Indian reservation. President Bush on Jan. 6 created the Cedar Mountain Wilderness Area.
Also blocking the way are state-owned parcels abutting the wilderness area and a section of mud flats. Together those obstacles cut off alternate rail routes, Chancellor said.
PFS Chairman John Parkyn has said he might be able to off-load the canisters from a main Union Pacific line near Interstate 80. But for that to happen, BLM would have to yield 20 acres of land for a transfer station, Chancellor said.
The BLM has opened public comment on granting a right of way for the transfer station or a rail spur down Skull Valley. A decision isn't expected for months. Either method of delivery is permitted by the NRC license, although the alignment of a rail line would need the approval of the Surface Transportation Board.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs, meanwhile, has to decide if the project is in the interests of the 121-member Skull Valley band of Goshute Indians.
PFS plans to store 44,000 tons of spent uranium fuel rods with a radioactive half-life of 10,000 years on the reservation until the federal government can open a national repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain.
PFS has until Friday to review the license for technical or typographical errors.
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Salt Lake Tribune
February 14, 2006
PFS gets desert N-dump license
But numerous obstacles remain; Hatch calls the action meaningless
By Robert Gehrke
The Salt Lake Tribune
WASHINGTON - Private Fuel Storage received the first-ever license for commercial, off-site storage of nuclear waste from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Monday, but a series of obstacles remain before the proposed facility can open its gates in Utah.
Specifically, the group of electric utilities seeking to store 44,000 tons of reactor fuel on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation still has to find an acceptable way to deliver the waste to the site 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, and has to sell the storage space to enough reactor operators to make the economics add up. It also must prevail in a legal challenge filed by the state.
The commission hand-delivered the license Monday to PFS Chairman John Parkyn, who was heading up a meeting of the American Nuclear Society in Chicago.
"It is a very significant step. It's the end of an 8 1/2 -year process with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, so we're very pleased that it has happened," said Sue Martin, PFS spokeswoman.
PFS plans the temporary storage until a permanent repository can be built beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
Nuclear regulatory commissioners voted in September to approve the lease, and the commission staff has been working since then to write the formal document.
Michael S. Lee, counsel to Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., noted the license will not be valid until the company meets several requirements. One such provision is that the 20-ton lids be welded onto the steel and concrete casks after being transported to the site - to a one-sixteenth-inch fit.
"This is just another one of the big hurdles that PFS will have to clear," Lee said.
The license does not authorize PFS to begin construction immediately. The company still has to show it has adequate finances to build the site, then has to show it has enough waste-storage contracts to fund dismantling and cleaning up the site before it can begin operations.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said in a statement Monday that the license is meaningless. Hatch has said that the crumbling PFS coalition, which has lost several members in recent months, will make it impossible to meet the financial terms.
"The NRC's making an awful decision, but we can't let it deter us from killing this project once and for all," Hatch said. "This marks the first time the NRC intends to grant a license for a private, off-site storage site for spent nuclear fuel. That's a bad precedent, especially since the PFS is clearly not part of the government's nuclear waste program."
Hatch said the NRC's decision to proceed without agreement from the Bureau of Land Management over protection of cultural and historic sites opens another avenue for a legal challenge to the PFS plan. The consortium also has to receive permission from the BLM for a permit to allow waste to be delivered to Skull Valley.
The issue of waste delivery became complicated when the Utah congressional delegation pushed through Congress a wilderness area near the Skull Valley reservation that essentially blocked plans to build a rail line to the reservation.
Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, said the issuance of a license was not a surprise.
"I'm glad our provision to block the most-preferred transportation route for the waste finally passed and was signed into law last month by the president," Bishop said in a statement. "That will ensure that even with a license, PFS is far from making this unwise project a reality."
PFS' other transportation option is to build a transfer facility to move the nuclear waste from rail cars to heavy trucks, which would drive the material to the storage site.
The BLM is reviewing the proposed transfer facility, and recently opened a 90-day public comment period on the plan. Jason Groenewold, director of the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, said public input on the BLM right-of-way could mean an insurmountable obstacle.
"The real question is, will PFS ante up or will they be persuaded to fold?" he said.
PFS has until Friday to review the license for technical or typographical errors. Utah attorneys also will receive a copy but cannot recommend changes.
--Reporter Judy Fahys contributed to this story.
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Florida Ledger
February 14, 2006
Oh, Never Mind
President George W. Bush made a fine pitch two weeks ago for kicking America's oil "addiction" and promoting alternative fuels, including a new generation of nuclear power plants. But the new Bush budget last week reneges on the federal government's decades-old commitment to build a nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev.
The Energy Department has for years been collecting a surcharge on some utility bills on the promise to build the repository. But Energy's $18 billion trust fund will only begin to cover the estimated $60 billion cost of the much-litigated repository. That means nuclear power plants will continue to be left to their own devices when it comes to safely storing radioactive spent fuel rods. That poses significant financial and liability problems for companies contemplating new plants.
Not to worry, though. The new Bush budget contains more than $12 million for new gas and oil exploration in Alaska's National Wildlife Refuge.
Have to keep feeding the oil addiction, you know.
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NY Newsday
February 14, 2006
Editorials:
Nuclear waste 'fear factor'
Recent report says risks are small
Those of us who see energy independence as a key national priority should be cheered by a recent report about nuclear waste. A panel of scientists has approved of federal plans to ship tens of thousands of tons of waste from nuclear power plants for disposal in a Nevada mountain. The scientists' thorough review of the Energy Department's plans finds that transportation and disposal of the spent fuel poses "no fundamental technical barriers" and carries low and easily manageable risks.
That's heartening news, especially since it comes from an independent panel put together not by the DOE but by the National Research Council, part of the prestigious National Academy of sciences.
If the United States is ever going to make progress toward energy independence by severing or diminishing its link to imported oil, we must consider expanding nuclear power production, a viable alternative that to many remains unpalatable and frightening. The biggest obstacle to enlarging the nation's nuclear capacity is still the challenge of where and how to dispose safely of nuclear waste.
The Energy Department has designated Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert, 90 miles from Las Vegas, as the site where spent fuel from 70 power plants in 31 states would be stored, entombed in concrete and metal canisters capable of withstanding any conceivable seismic shock or military strike. But the plan has been under attack from environmentalists and anti-nuclear power activists who say the shipments could trigger uncontrollable nuclear accidents or be subject to terrorism.
The council's report shows such concerns are unwarranted and the risks minimal. The panel acknowledged, however, that the biggest obstacle to the plans is the "fear factor," a psychological and political barrier that the nation's energy consumers must overcome if we are to strive for energy independence.
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Earth & Sky
February 13, 2006
Interview: Phillip Finck
Phillip Finck is Deputy Associate Laboratory Director of Applied Science and Technology and National Security for Argonne National Laboratory, operated by the University of Chicago for the Department of Energy. Finck coordinates all nuclear energy related activities at Argonne, including the development of an experimental program that intends to safely recycle nuclear waste.
Dr. Finck spoke with Earth & Sky's Jorge Salazar about his vision of sustainable use of nuclear energy through reprocessing spent nuclear fuel.
Salazar: Thank you for speaking with me today, Dr. Finck. Could you explain just how nuclear fuel recycling works?
Finck: Let me first explain what a nuclear fuel cycle is. Typically, we have about 400 reactors in the world, and most of them work with what's called one full cycle. You put fresh fuel in the reactor, typically the fresh fuel contains mostly uranium 238 and a little bit, about 5% of uranium 235, and you burn it for some time. When you extract it, the spent fuel contains only a little bit of uranium 235, but it also contains fission products, plutonium, americium, neptunium, in small quantities.
Many countries right now are still working with what's called the once-through cycle. Once you've irradiated the fuel for a while, for say three years, you take it out and store it for a while, and eventually you will send it to a geological repository such as the one that the U.S. is developing at Yucca Mountain.
One important consideration is to see how nuclear is going to develop for the world. It is clear to me, that with the growing energy problems that we're seeing, the need for energy independence, plus the need for higher energy production in countries that are developing right now, nuclear is one of the key options. And the once-through cycle, in the long term, is probably not sustainable, for three reasons.
The first reason is that eventually, uranium supplies will run out. Now, that's not for quite a while, we have time to get ready for this, but certainly we have to think about it.
The second reason that the once-through cycle just described is not sustainable is that we have to find a way to dispose of the irradiated nuclear fuel. The geologic repository approach we have adapted, for example, in the U.S. is a complex way of doing things. We are working on opening Yucca Mountain, but we already know that the capacity of Yucca Mountain, the legislative capacity of Yucca Mountain, will be reached by 2010, that's in a few years. And the technical limit of Yucca Mountain will be reached by 2030, which is when the current fleet of reactors will be retired in the U.S. So certainly, we need to look at our long-term solution, maybe other repositories, maybe advanced fuel cycles to do the job. Our country is also looking into repositories. Nobody has yet opened one. There is, typically, quite a bit of public and political resistance to geological repositories.
One alternative solution that has been adopted in a few countries is what I call limited recycle. Limited recycle is something that has been implemented right now in France, Japan, the U.K., Russia to some extant. And the idea is to take the spent fuel, and instead of sending it to a repository, you send it to what is called a reprocessing process. What you do out of the reprocessing is that you separate the components of the spent fuel into groups of individual species that you dispose of in different ways.
The closed fuel cycle consists, right now, as implemented, for example, in France, of extracting the plutonium out of spent fuel. And typically, spent fuel contains about 1% plutonium, taking that plutonium and fabricating new fuel out of it, which is called mox fuel. That's an industrial process that's in existence in several countries and was developed a long time ago in the U.S. And I think that most of the world technology is derived from U.S. technology. The idea is that once you have fabricated that mox fuel that contains the plutonium, you irradiate it again and you burn a fraction of the plutonium. Eventually, of course, you still will have some irradiated mox assemblies that you will need to dispose of. Again, going to a repository is a solution that is being looked at very strongly.
An alternate solution is to go to what we call a closed fuel cycle. In the closed fuel cycle, instead of only extracting plutonium, you would extract, together, all of the transuranic elements, plutonium, americium, neptunium, and curium, you would send them to a fast reactor, that's a reactor where neutrons stay at high energy and are not motivated by water. The advantage of this is that the fast neutrons help you destroy these transuranic elements. What you do is that you add them into a fast reactor, you extract the spent fuel, and you recycle in the reactor.
And what we have shown, in many tests over the last 20 or 30 years is that you're likely to be able to reduce the toxicity of the cycle of the nuclear waste by a factor of up to 100. What this translates to is that you could put 100 times more waste into a given repository. And we have to be careful to normalize that hundred times. Essentially, for the same repository, you could produce 100 times more electricity in your nuclear reactors, or you could have 100 times more reactors, or you would need 100 times less repositories. There are many ways to normalize that. But the idea of the closed fuel cycle is to extract out of the spent fuel these elements that could be a problem and destroy them for fission.
Where do we stand today? Some of the technologies have already been developed, and in some certain cases, deployed for the world. There exist today reprocessing plants in Russia, in France, in the U.K., there's one that is under completion in Japan that actually takes the spent fuel from the conventional reactors and does the separation based on the PUREX process.
PUREX is a process that is very well known in industry, that existed in Europe and was developed in the U.S. many years ago. It has, in my mind, the disadvantage of separating pure plutonium, which raises proliferation issues. I believe that we should never separate pure plutonium, and that is also the U.S. policy. Separation of pure plutonium leads to possible build up of materials that can be misused.
So we have been developing, at Argonne, with two other laboratories in Idaho and Oak Ridge National Lab, the process called UREX+ that would replace PUREX. And the main idea of UREX plus is that it would keep together all of the transuranics, that is the materials that are much less attractive for misuse, and then send that material directly to fast reactors in adequate fuel form, additional to what it would manage the other elements to separate, it would send various streams to various types of waste forms, and most importantly, it would not create any liquid waste, which to us is a key condition. We want to drive towards processes that are as "green" as possible, that are as clean as possible. Going from PUREX to UREX in U.S. industry is a process we have to go through, which is probably not too complex, but we still need to go through demonstration stages. UREX has been demonstrated at laboratory scales to kilogram quantities of spent fuel here at Argonne. And we met all of our expectations.
The next stage is to irradiate this in a fast reactor. The first reactor that ever produced electricity in the world was a reactor that we designed at Argonne and built in Idaho in the early 1950s, before I was born, actually. Reactors like that have been built in various countries throughout the world. We have built some, the Russians and Japanese, the British, the French, the Germans, currently the Chinese and the Indians are each building one. It's a technology that's relatively well-known. We have some operational experience, typically you learn from having difficulties, and we have solved those difficulties, so we think that reactor technology is ready to go. And we at Argonne are certainly more interested in designing and building one. There are some remaining issues that need to be resolved. We need to make sure that we know to fabricate fuels that contain a significant amount of transuranic elements, and we have done some of that. We are not totally finished. We are collaborating with foreign countries and doing that. We need, also, for that very special fast reactor fuel, we need to make sure that we have a process to recycle it. Special process has been developed at Argonne for the last 20 years. Again, we are collaborating with foreign countries. And there are still a couple of issues that we believe we can solve, but we need to finish the R&D process.
Many of the technologies exist, there are still some R&D to be completed, and then some large-scale demonstrations are needed.
Salazar: Elaborate a little more on the UREX and PUREX reprocessing method.
Finck: I 'm really talking about two different processes. There is one that is used to reprocess the spent fuel from current commercial reactors. That's called UREX. And then there is a process that will be used to reprocess the fast reactor fuel. That's pyro-processing.
UREX is essentially a process where you dissolve the spent fuel in a nitric acid solution, and then you do a successive operation to extract first the transuranic elements. You also extract the fission products, you also extract the uranium in a very clean form. And then you use the various products for different applications. Uranium would probably be kept for future operations in fuel. The Trans-uranics are used to fabricate fuel for a fast reactor. The fission products are extracted and stored in a very stable waste form for disposal.
The big different in the pyro-processing scheme that we are talking about is that pyro-processing is not a scheme based on dissolution in aqueous solution. It's essentially, electrolysis of fuel in molten salt. The advantage of this is that it does group separation of the transuranics, all the transuranics stay together in it. It works very well for fuel that is very hot. It works very well for fuel that is very hot. It also doesn't have critical limits, typically when you mix fuel an water, critical limits are low, whereas with pyro-processing there is no water, and criticality limits are higher. But the main advantage is that it works very easily with hot fuel. Pyro-processing is not new. None of the processes that I'm talking about have been invented recently. PUREX is about 50 years old. Pyroprocessing has been used in other industries, for example aluminum industry for many years. So, in a sense, we have just adapted these industrial processes to our use. And that's what we've been doing the R&D on for the last many years.
Salazar: So is the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuels safe?
Finck: Let me talk quickly about safety. One point I want to make is that Argonne doesn't work alone. We are always collaborating with most of the other laboratories. There is actually a very good collaboration, it's a very good spirit right now. Argonne pioneered, about 20 years ago, a concept called passive safety. We developed a reactor design, that based on physical principles shuts itself down if anything abnormal occurs. It was not only developed on paper, it was actually demonstrated physically in a reactor called EVR-2 that existed in Idaho at a time, and we demonstrated through various events, unexpected events, the reactor based on pure physical principles would go back to a safe mode. And we believe, I believe strongly that this is probably one of the biggest progress in nuclear energy in the last 20 years is to go to passive safety for a reactor. And this concept is being applied more and more to other designs of reactors that we see emerging right now.
In general, as far as I know, in civilian applications, there has been no accidents related to our reprocessing plants. We are essentially working on very sound safety principles. We plan to have no effluence to the public, and the basis of the design, we guarantee ourselves against any abnormal event by design. It's just a very low probability, a nonexistent probability of accident. The plant that has operated in France and the U.K. have had no accidents. It's been a very safe operation, and a very good industrial experience there.
Salazar: Thank you for speaking with me today, Dr. Finck. Is there anything else you'd like to share with the public today?
Finck: I think that, the bottom line is that today, the nuclear option is really necessary to ensure our energy security for the long term. Mixed with our technology, I think that we should develop not only nuclear, but we should develop all forms of energy, and nuclear is very important to that mix. The fact of going to advance fuel cycle will provide us the benefit of long-term sustainability in the sense that it will significantly reduce the amount of waste produced. We will actually significantly insure long-term supply of energy. We will also, by using this closed fuel cycle, reduce the global risk of buildup of special nuclear materials by burning them.
Salazar: So what lies in the development of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel?
Finck: The technology is beyond the laboratory scale, all are either fully implemented, and we need to go, I would say, worldwide, with demonstration of these technologies. We need to build plants of a pilot scale size to really show that they are working at real scale. We need to also build an international consensus to develop these things. I think that international collaboration is very important in these matters to move forward. The step is to move to a demonstration stage, and then, when we are done with a demonstration, there comes the time to decide where to implement them commercially, or not. In the U.S.,we used to have reprocessing plants, we don't have any anymore. Any process of deployment of the technology would have to go through some pilot-scale and then commercial plant. Rough timeline to go to a commercial plant is roughly 20 years. In France, U.K., and Russia, they have plants operating right now that are operating on the PUREX technology, not on the UREX technology. The Japanese, I believe, have been building one for a few years and are very close to opening it (Rokkasho).
Salazar: Thank you again for your time today.
Finck: Thank you very much. I think this is very important for our future. we need to get these technologies going. It's important for our energy security and it's important for our global world stability.
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Earth & Sky
February 13, 2006
Interview: Frank von Hippel
Frank N. von Hippel is co-director of the Program on Science and Global Security of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. He is a former Assistant Director for National Security in the White House Office of Science and Technology. His areas of policy research include nuclear arms control and nonproliferation, energy, and checks and balances in policymaking for technology. In early February, 2006, Dr. von Hippel spoke to Earth & Sky's Jorge Salazar about his concerns over renewed interest to reprocess spent nuclear fuels.
Salazar: Can we start with some background about nuclear power and the reprocessing of nuclear fuel?
von Hippel: Nuclear fuel, when it goes into the reactor, is basically 100% uranium. It's somewhat enriched to 4-5% in the chain reacting isotope, uranium 235. When it comes out, most of that uranium 235 has been fissioned, and that's where the nuclear energy comes from. And about 1% of the uranium has been turned into plutonium. And the original purpose, and the primary purpose of reprocessing this spent nuclear fuel is to recover that plutonium and to recycle. It has fuel value just like the uranium 235.
Now, this is an idea that is as old as nuclear power. In fact it's older than nuclear power because this process is the way in which plutonium was produced for nuclear weapons, before we had nuclear power. And that's what makes it controversial, because if we promote this as a civilian technology, it gives access to any country with nuclear power plants, it gives them access to plutonium, to separated plutonium, which can be directly used to make nuclear weapons like the Nagasaki bomb.
Now, the original reason for promoting this, from the very beginning of nuclear power, was the concern that nuclear power was going to very quickly going to outgrow the uranium resources of high-grade uranium ore, and therefore nuclear power would just be a flash in the pan, unless it was possible to make much more efficient use of uranium. Now, the current generation of reactors can't make much more efficient use of uranium, but there was an idea of a different kind of reactor which was invented called the plutonium breeder reactor, which could in fact use uranium 100 times more efficiently than the current generation of reactors could. And, in the 1960s and the 1970, countries like the United States and other advanced industrialized countries put most of their energy and R&D money into an effort to demonstrate and commercialize these plutonium breeder reactors.
It turns out that they were very expensive. One reason is that they're cooled by liquid sodium -- liquid sodium catches fire if it's exposed ot the air or water. That was a great complication. And it turned out that there was a lot more uranium than people thought, and it turned out that nuclear power didn't grow anywhere near as rapidly. The projections that were being made 30 years ago for nuclear power in the United States, it was expected that by the year 2000, the U.S. would have 1000 nuclear power plants and it would be building 100 a year. Well, in fact, we have a hundred. And we've had a hundred since the 1980s or so. There's an attempt now, with the incentives that are in the last energy policy act, to get industry to buy a few more, with the very large subsidies that are being provided there for the first ones, and then the hope that they might take off.
So, reprocessing is no longer motivated by the original purpose, which was to separate plutonium to start up plutonium breeder reactors. Today, reprocessing is motivated primarily by the fact that it's been very difficult to find a place to put spent fuel after it's discharged from nuclear reactors. It's accumulating onsite at the reactors. That's not really a problem in the near-term, because after it's cooled down for a few years, you can put it in dry storage, which is quite safe. But eventually it will have to be moved, and the destination in this country was supposed to be Yucca Mountain, this mountain just next to the nuclear test site in Nevada, which was chosen by Congress a couple of decades ago.
In fact the the Department of Energy committed that Yucca Mountain would be opened, and the Department of Energy would start removing spent nuclear fuel from U.S. nuclear power plants by 1998. Well, it didn't happen, Yucca Mountain is still not licensed. And so now there's pressure, political pressure to get the spent fuel off site and to demonstrate that there's someplace for it to go as part of the way to convince the public that this is not an inseparable problem, and that we can build new nuclear power plants which will generate more spent nuclear fuel.
So the reprocessing plans that we expect will be proposed by the Bush administration next week, if they're not already mentioned tonight in the State of the Union address, would provide another destination, another place to put the spent nuclear fuel that has being discharged from U.S. nuclear power plants until Yucca Mountain becomes available. Now, one could just simply transport the spent fuel to another site and store it there. From my point of view, that would be the best thing to do, so not to separate out more plutonium.
Right now there's hundreds of tons of plutonium that have been separated in other countries, which they're struggling what to do with as a result of reprocessing. About 30% of the world's spent fuel is being reprocessed. The U.S. took a stand against reprocessing 30 years ago for nonproliferation reasons. And so there's plenty of separated plutonium, and in fact we have excess weapons plutonium from our cold war arsenal which is being downsized, which we're struggling to figure out what to do with.
So the best thing would be to just store the spent fuel, either at the reactor sites or someplace else. The problem is that if you want to take it someplace else, there's going to be tremendous push back from the state and local government. So the unspoken political calculation is, that if we give this location, we offer a facility that represents tens of billions of dollars of investment, in fact there would be some sites in the United States which would volunteer to take this spent fuel and the radioactive waste that would be created by reprocessing it on an interim basis until some long-term solution for their waste problem can be found.
Salazar: The idea of reprocessing nuclear fuel looks good on paper. Assuming that some kinks in the way its done get worked out in the future, what's the problem?
von Hippel: First of all, there is no hurry to do this, because, in fact, spent fuel is in very stable form, and I think we can store it safely and cheaply for a hundred years if we have to. So the problem with rushing forward with this has to do with the example that we set for the rest of the world, for example for Iran. This is why, in fact, U.S. policy turned against reprocessing 39 years ago.
What happened was that the U.S. was promoting reprocessing worldwide. We were saying," nuclear power is the future of energy. And plutonium breeder reactors are going to be the future of nuclear power, and it will be essential for plutonium breeder reactors to separate plutonium and recycle it. So you might as well learn this technology now."
One of the countries that we provided the technology and trained the people in its use was India. And, we said, "of course, you understand that this technology is being provided on the understanding that it will be used for peaceful purposes only." And India did separate some plutonium from fuel, it only had a research reactor at the time. And the first thing they did with that fuel was in fact make a nuclear explosive. They said, "look, this is a peaceful nuclear explosive, so we are in conformance with our agreement with you." And, in fact, there were some people in the United States who were promoting the idea of nuclear explosives for excavating canals and harbors and things like that, so that was the fig leaf that they used.
But, in fact, after the Indians did this, The U.S. started rethinking the promotion of reprocessing worldwide. And, in fact it was just at a time when other countries as well as we were promoting and transferring the technology to countries like South Korea, Brazil, Pakistan, and so on. And we then intervened in a very forceful way. We said that we reviewed the policy and decided that it was not necessary, it was not economic, and there was plenty of uranium for what we have been practicing ever since, for what we call the once through fuel cycle, where you basically put in low enriched uranium into a reactor into a reactor and then you store the spent fuel.
And our policy was very effective. No new countries since we changed our policies have begun reprocessing. the number of countries who were on the verge of it didn't go forward, and some countries that were reprocessing have abandoned it, like Germany for example, and soon, the United Kingdom. They've found that it in fact is very costly, and that it in fact, since you have to store the radioactive waste that comes out of the reprocessing plant, you're only recovering the plutonium, why not just store everything together. And the advantages there are that the plutonium in spent fuel is mixed with very highly radioactive fission products so that you can't get at it except behind thick radiation shielding and remote handling equipment, very costly equipment, which is not available to would be nuclear terrorists. And, whereas plutonium, you can actually carry plutonium around in a plastic bag, it doesn't put much penetrating radiation at all, and therefore someone could run away with it and make it into a bomb.
Salazar: Doesn't it kind of make sense for the U.S. to take the lead on reprocessing, keep this work "in-house" and provide the services to the rest of the world, just so that we can rest assured that there will be good controls on it?
von Hippel: If in fact everybody agreed to send their spent fuel to us or Russia, or France, or Japan, and no new countries got into this business, it would at least limit the proliferation problem. France and the U.K. have been providing that service to other countries. But what they've been doing is sending back the separated plutonium, sometimes in the form of fuel, but in a much more accessible way than it is in the spent fuel.
So we'd have to do what Russia does, which is in fact to take the spent fuel and then keep the high level waste and the plutonium. And that's something that only the Russian public, well, in fact the Russian objects to that, but in fact it's not enough of a democracy yet to where they haven't been able to be overridden on that. So that's something that in fact I think would be a very tough sell in the United States.
But let's say that it could be done. We're actually trying to do this in another area right now, in the area of uranium enrichment. That's the focus of the current struggle that western european countries, the U.S. and other countries are having with Iran.
We're trying to persuade Iran that Iran does not need to enrich Uranium for its nuclear power plants. That that service can be provided by other countries, and in fact Russia is trying to continue a contract to do it for Iran's first nuclear power plant. Iran is saying that it's their right to do it for themselves. Our concern is that uranium enrichment is another route to nuclear weapons capability, because while the current generation of nuclear power plants uses uranium enriched only 4 or 5 % uranium 235, which is not weapons usable, you can put the uranium and cycle it through the plant a couple more times and you would get out weapons-grade uranium. And many people see that Iran's interest in acquiring an enrichment plant adds, in fact, a way to get a nuclear weapons option.
Uranium enrichment, really, is a service that countries need. Reprocessing is a service that countries don't need. So I think that we should try to sort this out and establish this kind of arrangement to first see if we can sell it to the rest of the world, first with uranium enrichment. And Iran is not the only country which is pushing back on this. Brazil, South Africa, and the developing world sees this as, some of them actually describe this as a kind of "nuclear apartheid," where certain number of countries want to not only be the only countries with nuclear weapons, but also the only countries with other advanced nuclear technologies. It's a very tricky political business, and there's no need, because spent fuel can be stored for many decades cheaply, there's no real need to open up a second front in this battle right now.
Salazar: A very basic question to all this business of reprocessing nuclear fuel is, how safe is it. Comments?
von Hippel: Originally, the way reprocessing was processed when we were separating plutonium for weapons was a very environmentally messy business. And there is a huge cleanup legacy, in both countries in the range of a hundred billion dollars to clean up the radioactive waste that was left by the process.
The process that's being practiced by France and the United Kingdom today, and Japan wants to get into this business soon, is much cleaner. There still are releases to the atmosphere and to water that would not happen otherwise, if the radioactivity was just allowed to decay for a hundred years in the spent fuel. But it's not a really big deal.
But was is potentially a big deal is that the radioactive waste is in liquid form after the spent fuel is dissolved, and can accumulate to very large quantities, the equivalent radioactivity of 10-100 reactors in just a few tanks in liquid form. So it would be a catastrophic event, if in fact those tanks, if there was an accident that blew up one of those tanks or if it was sabotaged. This is a real problem, and in fact it's been a great concern especially in the United Kingdom. Now, eventually that liquid waste is solidified, it's mixed with glass and comes back to a form that is comparably stable to the original form in spent fuel. But there is that intermediate stage when you really could have a major, major accident. And on the safety front, that's my main concern.
I think that the reprocessing issue has to be separated from the issue of the future of nuclear power. And it can be kept separate from that for 100 years or so, at least, until we get to very much higher levels of nuclear power. Technically, it can be separated, and in fact there's and MIT study which predicts a nuclear future where the U.S. has 500 nuclear power plants about 50 years from now, or in 2050, up from 100 now, a very robust nuclear future, where in fact the nuclear power plants would be producing as much electricity as we get from all sources today, without reprocessing. In fact they argue that reprocessing could be the kiss of death of nuclear power in the United States today, because it is so costly. The cost of reprocessing and recycling and doing everything that is being proposed as an alternative to putting the plutonium into Yucca Mountain would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, enough to buy 100 new nuclear power plants, to basically replace our whole current nuclear infrastructure. So if the consumer, the utilities were asked to pay for that, then that would make nuclear power uncompetitive. Now, the French and the Japanese are getting around that by putting a tax to support reprocessing, and if the utilities in this country were to come out in opposition to reprocessing if they had to pay for it, but they're understanding of it is that this is going to be a subsidy to nuclear power form the federal government to the tune of many billions of dollars a year. It's a completely unnecessary thing in the near term is what I'm saying, and that we have more important issues with regard to nuclear power to deal with. So, it's just complicating life for those who realistically want to promote nuclear power for the next decade.
Salazar: Thank you for your time today, Dr. von Hippel. Is there anything else that you'd like to share with the public today?
von Hippel: I guess I would encapsulate it and say that it's enormously expensive. Secondly, it will enormously complicate our nonproliferation efforts, our anti-nuclear terrorism efforts. And third, it's not necessary to the future of nuclear power in the near term, that is in the next 50-10 years.
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Earth & Sky
February 13, 2006
Interview: Edwin Lyman
Edwin Lyman is a Senior Staff Scientist in the Global Security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, DC. This organization believes that nuclear fuel reprocessing would increase the risk of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons and exacerbate the nuclear waste problem. Lyman's research focuses on security and environmental issues associated with the management of nuclear materials and the operation of nuclear power plants. He spoke with Earth & Sky's Jorge Salazar in early February 2006.
Salazar: Please give me some background. What is nuclear reprocessing, or "recycling?"
Lyman: Since the dawn of the nuclear power era, the dream of nuclear scientists has been to utilize the plutonium that occurs occurs as a nuclear energy by-product. This plutonium could, in principle, be used in a different type of nuclear reactor than the kind that we use in the United States today. It's called a fast breeder reactor.
In principle, a fast breeder reactor could be used to produce slightly more nuclear fuel than it consumes. So, the dream was that plutonium could be used to provide, essentially, an inexhaustible energy resource.
However, over the years, reality has intruded. It turns that the technology is much more complicated, cumbersome, and dangerous than was originally envisioned. And for that reason, the original dream of inexhaustible fuel from nuclear hasn't been realized.
One of the concerns associated with reusing the plutonium in spent fuel is that plutonium is not only a potential energy source. It's a nuclear weapons material. So any nuclear reactor that handles pure plutonium in its fuel has to have much greater security over its operations and its materials than reactors that don't have this sensitive material. And that greatly increases the cost associated with nuclear energy.
Also, the plutonium has to be tracked extremely carefully at every stage of the process. That's because it only takes a few kilograms of plutonium to make a nuclear weapon, and the typical large reprocessing plant might handle something like eight metric tons of plutonium a year. That is on the order of a thousand times the amount it would take to make one nuclear weapon.
Salazar: But isn't the U.S. capable of handling the precautions needed, given that it's a leader in the world of nuclear reprocessing?
Lyman: Actually, the U.S. is the leader in not using this technology. That was a very deliberate policy decision that was made in the 1970s, originally in the Ford administration, then carried out by the Carter administration. The decision was that the spent fuel from nuclear power plants should not be reprocessed, and the plutonium in that fuel not be extracted and then used for commercial purposes.
And the reason for that is that in the 1970s, the proliferation risks associated with nuclear energy were becoming even more manifest. India developed a nuclear weapon using technology that it had acquired from Canada and the United States for ostensibly peaceful purposes. And as a result, U.S. policy makers realized the amount of plutonium that could be circulating throughout the world if a fully realized reprocessing and recycling program were instituted. They realized it would be virtually impossible to control that technology and make sure that not a single gram of plutonium actually was misused for weapons purposes.
Because of that, the Carter administration decided that the U.S., instead of reprocessing spent fuel, would pursue a policy of developing a geologic repository so that the spent fuel could be directly disposed of in a mine repository and isolated from the environment that way, without reprocessing.
Other countries, notably France, the United Kingdom, and Japan, did not follow the the U.S. lead. They developed and pursued reprocessing programs on their own. As a result, all three of those countries have substantial stockpiles of separated plutonium that they are paying significant exorbitantly amounts of money to secure. The United States does not have that particular problem.
The reason that the U.S. is now revisiting that decision is that the repository program at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, has run into political difficulties. Those were fully expected, because no one said it would be easy to situate a high level nuclear waste dump anywhere in the United States. But the political opponents to the repository seem to have gotten the upper hand. Scientists within the Department of Energy complex who have been nursing a grudge for 30 years since the Carter administration curtailed their own research programs have been seeking a way to once again expand and become the future of nuclear energy. And I think they've seen the opportunity in the current political context.
So there haven't been any new technological developments that have made this technology look more attractive. In fact, it's quite the opposite, in that it's become clear from the experience of other countries that although it's very easy to separate the plutonium from the reactor fuel if you spend enough money doing it, reprocessing is a very expensive operation.
The difficulty is, what do you do with that plutonium? If you just let it pile up, you're creating a massive proliferation risk. So the intent would be to use that plutonium as fuel in reactors.
But, in reality, that's not what's happening overseas to a large extent. For instance, in the United Kingdom, they have built up a stockpile of 80 metric tons of plutonium that they have absolutely no plans to utilize in a reactor. So all they've done is reprocess spent fuel, accumulated plutonium, accumulated high waste, and they have no plans for disposing either type of material. It's hard to look at that program and say that this is something that the U.S. should be emulating.
France, on the other hand, has had somewhat more success in using at least part of the plutonium that its separated in fuel in its existing reactors. But it turns out that the fuel that has plutonium in it is much more expensive and cumbersome than the typical uranium fuel that is used by most reactors in the world. So the reactor operators in France are essentially provided subsidies to take this material off the hands of the reprocessing company. And because there are technical limits on the ability to use plutonium fuel in these reactors, it's a much less desirable fuel than uranium.
Salazar: Well, in theory, doesn't it make sense to try and develop technologies that reuse spent nuclear fuel, which is accumulating by the truckload each year, and trust that scientists will eventually work out the bugs in the process?
Lyman: Well, on paper, a lot of things look good. But when you're talking about engineering such a delicate, dangerous, and expensive system to carry out such a process, the devil is in the details.
And actually getting like something like that to work is the problem. It turns out that if you wanted to have a system of reprocessing plants - and advanced reactors to utilize the plutonium coming out of reprocessing plants - for that system to have the effect that you mentioned (to reduce the amount of nuclear waste that would have to be sent to a repository by a factor of 100), it would require an effort that would take well over a century. Just for the amount of spent fuel we've already accumulated, it would cost anywhere from $300 billion to $500 billion. That was from estimates provided by both the Department of Energy and the National Academy of Sciences. And most of that would require government subsidies to the electric utility industry to carry out.
So, yes, the idea sounds good. But the fact is the technology isn't there yet. Even if it were there, it would be much more expensive than the current nuclear power technologies, and it would require a level of control over the nuclear energy infrastructure that would be unparalleled. It would essentially mean that the federal government would have to take over the whole business of generating nuclear electricity and disposing of waste. And it's not clear that that is the right direction for the U.S. to go with regards to its energy policy.
Salazar: Thank you, Dr. Lyman.
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State of Nevada
Agency for Nuclear Projects
www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/
nwpo@nuc.state.nv.us
775-687-3744
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