Bush administration's nuclear waste reprocessing plan criticized

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) had an idea which looked good on its face: Take other countries’ nuclear materials for reprocessing in the United States. The program, Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), aims to encourage worldwide adoption of nuclear power by sharing reactor know-how — but not reprocessing technologies which could be used to divert material for nuclear weapons. The program is now being criticized by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which recommends that GNEP be scaled back.

A panel of seventeen scientists and nuclear experts issued a report saying that GNEP would mean that a handful of member countries including China, Russia, France, Japan, and Australia would recycle spent fuel from nuclear power stations in other countries. These reprocessing nations are relying on fledgling technologies which minimize by-products such as plutonium, but the report claims these technologies are unproven. The findings have been welcomed by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). “GNEP has the potential to become the greatest technological debacle in U.S. history,” says Ivan Oelrich of the FAS.

Background

The purpose of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel is to remove materials from the radioactive waste so that the scrubbed, or “cleaned,” nuclear material can be recycled for use at another nuclear power plant. In the past, the United States has resisted reprocessing because the methods available at the time created — or “separated” — plutonium as a byproduct of reprocessing (the term “separated” is used because, in reprocessing, plutonium is separated from the spent uranium rods). The ready availability of plutonium would have increased the risk of nuclear weapon proliferation. In recent years, however, the U.S. government began to reconsider reprocessing more favorably as new technologies emerged that could recycle the spent nuclear fuel without separating plutonium. This process is a main technical goal of GNEP.

The NAS panel argues that the technologies required for achieving GNEP’s goals are too early in development to justify DOE’s accelerated schedule for construction of commercial facilities that would use these technologies. DOE claims that the program will save time and money if pursued on the commercial scale, but the NAS expert committee believes that the opposite will likely be true and found no economic justification. In addition to addressing the risks of nuclear weapons proliferation, GNEP’s other stated goal is to reduce the overall amount of radioactive waste — by recycling and reusing most of it — which would in turn decrease the need for a second geological repository in addition to Yucca Mountain, but the NAS committee said it was not clear that such a need currently exists.

All seventeen members of the committee concluded that the GNEP R&D program, as currently planned, should not be pursued, but fifteen of the members said that the less-aggressive reprocessing research program that preceded the current one should be. If, however, DOE returns to the earlier program, called the Advance Fuel Cycle Initiative (AFCI), it should not commit to a major demonstration or deployment of reprocessing unless there is a clear economic, national security, or environmental reason to do so. The GNEP R&D program should be scaled back, the committee advocated, but the Office of Nuclear Energy should place greater emphasis on the Nuclear Power 2010 program. Key elements of this program include identifying sites for new nuclear power plants, completing the design engineering of advanced light water reactors, and assisting the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in its efforts to grant both construction and operating licenses in one action. The office has focused on many parts of the program, such as finalizing designs, and has established a good working relationship with industry, but overall progress has been slower than expected, the committee found. The NRC and industry need to improve the pace of specific licensing reviews for nuclear power plants, avoiding review of previously settled issues and setting a tighter schedule. If nuclear power is indeed going to play an increased role in meeting U.S. energy needs and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, Nuclear Power 2010 needs full funding in all aspects of the program, the committee said. “While an increase in funding has been proposed in the administration’s fiscal year 2008 budget, it would not be enough for the program to meet all of its goals,” the committee said.