October 21, 2009
Spent nuclear fuel may not have a permanent storage site. But that does not mean the energy form is dead. Far from it -- particularly because the used fuel can be reprocessed.
The issue is now under consideration by the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. While the concept has its foes who argue that it is expensive and a recipe for disaster, others say that it would help solve the long-term problem of where to store spent fuel. Reprocessing, now prevalent in France and Japan, separates the uranium and the plutonium from the rest of the nuclear waste. Nuclear operators would then be able to get between 20 percent and 30 percent more use from the uranium.
"Reprocessing is very real," says Dave Nulton, a nuclear engineer and former energy department official who spoke before the Colorado Rural Electric Association. "A new plant could be up and running in the United States in five years. And new technologies can make it impossible to use the plutonium in advanced weapons." Essentially, the technology to which he speaks would mix the plutonium with other compounds and thereby make it impractical to use for nuclear weapons.
Reprocessing has been around since World War II when this country first developed nuclear reactors to produce plutonium -- for the sole purpose of making weapons. In 1976 and under President Ford, the United States abandoned the practice, fearing that it could lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and particularly since India had the potential of making such weapons. A few years later, President Carter banned reprocessing altogether. And while President Reagan set aside the ban, neither his administration nor any since then have provided the funding to get it restarted.
Times are different now. The world is focused on global warming and becoming energy independent. The underlying dynamics are also in place: Today, 6.5 billion people exist but by 2050, that number is expected to 9.2 billion. By the time that developing countries electrify, the need for energy will double or triple.
Enter nuclear power, which emits no carbon emissions and which uses uranium that is plentiful. Meanwhile, nuclear plants are reliable base-load facilities that have low operating costs. According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, the average plant has a capacity factor of 91 percent. Coal and combined-cycle natural gas generators, by comparison, have capacity factors of 70 percent and 41 percent, respectively.
Right now, nuclear power provides about 15 percent of all global electrical needs, with 436 reactors in 31 countries. An additional 53 plants are now under construction, with 16 of them going up in China and 9 in Russia. In this country, only Watts Bar 2 is being built but there are several applications for new reactors -- all on sites that have been previously Okayed by regulators.
Controversial Undertaking
Many factors could hold up construction here, notably the regulatory process and the financing that would follow. But a key issue remains the spent fuel and what to do with it. Right now, the used fuel rods are cooled in pools for up to a year before they are stored in above-ground concrete-encased barrels.
That was to be a temporary solution until a permanent storage site was found. Yucca Mountain in Nevada was to be that place, although the Obama administration killed the funding and for all practical purposes, buried the program as well. The central problem with Yucca Mountain is that engineers have been unable to prove that water would not leach into the burial site, forcing designers to keep developing new barriers that have made the project cost-prohibitive.
All that is pushing reprocessing back into the limelight. But the technical review board studying the idea has said that its future use is "uncertain" here and emphasizes that while reprocessing may reduce nuclear waste, it does not eliminate it.
"While some supporters of a U.S. reprocessing program believe it would help solve the nuclear waste problem, reprocessing would not reduce the need for storage and disposal of radioactive waste," says the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Worse, reprocessing would make it easier for terrorists to acquire nuclear weapons materials, and for nations to develop nuclear weapons programs."
Those scientists disagree that newer technologies can render the separated plutonium useless in the development of nuclear weapons. They also say that commercial-scale reprocessing facilities cannot adequately track all of the waste that it would collect and recycle, complicating measures to prevent the theft of weapons-grade plutonium. Any reprocessing program here would add to an existing global stockpile of separated plutonium that is sitting in storage today, amounting to roughly 250 metric tons as of the end of 2005. That's enough to build 40,000 nuclear weapons, it adds.
Reprocessing and the use of plutonium as reactor fuel are also far more expensive than using uranium fuel and disposing of the spent fuel directly, the scientists say. The U.S. Department of Energy says that a reprocessing plant with an annual capacity of 2,000 metric tons of spent fuel would cost up to $20 billion to build -- and the U.S. would need two of these to reprocess all its spent fuel -- costs that the scientists say would be borne by U.S. taxpayers.
Answers as to how to deal with spent fuel are paramount. The government panel taking a close look implied that it may involve at least a two-step process whereby some is buried and some is re-used. For their part, nuclear scientists and are convinced that reprocessing can be done safely and effectively. It's a position bound to give their congressional backers increasing strength and particular in today's energy environment.
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