Earth & Sky

Reprocessing nuclear fuel expensive, unnecessary

Frank von Hippel calls it “an environmentally messy business.”

Frank N. von Hippel has conducted research in 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 any country with nuclear power plants 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.