Recycling nuclear fuel "looks good on paper"
Edwin Lyman calls it environmental hazard, national security risk.
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.
