Waste? Not!

by CKR

According to the 2 December Science magazine (subscription only; article reproduced here), the Department of Energy’s fiscal year 2006 budget contains $50 million toward a goal of beginning construction on an engineering-scale plant for reprocessing of nuclear fuel by 2010. A summary from the Office of Management and Budget presents a timeline and a suggestive sentence:

The Budget also continues research on advanced, proliferation-resistant nuclear fuel cycles, which would allow the Nation to extract the energy potential from spent nuclear fuel and dramatically reduce the quantity and toxicity of the remaining waste.

The word reprocessing is not used, but that’s what “extracting the energy potential from spent nuclear fuel” has to mean.

This represents a significant change in United States policy.

The current policy has been in force since 1977. On April 7 of that year, Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would no longer reprocess spent nuclear fuel. The rationale was that if plutonium and uranium were not separated via reprocessing, proliferation would be more difficult. Carter expected that other countries would follow.

The world has not followed the United States. Russia, France, Britain, and Japan all reprocess nuclear fuel. What the ban on reprocessing has done is lost the United States capability in this area and required that enormous, heavily protected volumes be developed for storage or disposal of spent nuclear fuel rods, primarily Yucca Mountain, although the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico, has also been mentioned as a possibility.

What is Reprocessing?

The uranium in the fuel of most commercial nuclear reactors is enriched to about 3.5% U-235 from its natural level of 0.7%. The U-235 fissions in those reactors, providing the heat that makes steam that drives the turbines to make electrical power. The rest of the uranium, U-238, picks up neutrons to become plutonium-239. Both the U-238 and the plutonium fission and provide some of the energy, too.

Fission literally breaks the atoms of uranium and plutonium apart into smaller atoms, called fission products, which are highly radioactive for relatively short times. The longest-lived fission products are strontium-90 and cesium-137, with half-lives of 25 and 33 years, respectively. After most of the U-235 has fissioned, the reactor no longer produces heat effectively, and the fuel must be replaced. The old fuel is called spent fuel. In the United States, it is also called nuclear waste, along with a wide variety of other materials, most of which are not so difficult to handle nor potentially valuable.

It was the plutonium and the possibility it could be diverted to use in nuclear weapons that bothered Jimmy Carter. The Indians had tested their first nuclear device in 1974. But that plutonium, along with the leftover uranium, can be reused as reactor fuel. Other countries see the plutonium and uranium as resources that shouldn’t be wasted. Petroleum is becoming more expensive, and concerns about greenhouse gases are increasing.

Reprocessing has been a messy business. The PUREX process (Plutonium-Uranium Extraction) was developed during World War II and has been the mainstay ever since. Although separating the plutonium and uranium for further use can decrease the volumes of waste that must be stored, past development and use of PUREX gave us the notorious underground tanks at Hanford, Washington, and Savannah River, South Carolina. Better methods for dealing with PUREX wastes are now available.

In the 1970s, a PUREX plant was being built at Barnwell, South Carolina. It was almost completed at about the time Carter changed US policy. It was never used for reprocessing.

There are other methods of reprocessing. Bill Hannum, Gerald Marsh, and George Stanford have an article on one of them in the December Scientific American. Here’s a similar article outside the subscription barrier.

Other methods of reprocessing haven’t been developed and used to the same extent as PUREX. They would require additional research and development, which presumably is the purpose of the new appropriations.

Security and resistance of reprocessing to diversion of nuclear materials is a concern. A number of innovations have been suggested to improve security. They range from the obvious step of locating reprocessing facilities near reactors, to decrease the necessity for transporting the materials, to technical fixes of the various processes. Again, some research and development will be necessary.

Removing reprocessing from development in the US has not achieved Carter’s goals. It has removed the US from the international discussion of how, when, and why to reprocess. Dealing with differences in policy on this subject has occupied probably thousands of hours of scientists’ and diplomats’ time and has slowed the progress of safeguarding Russian nuclear materials.

Nuclear power will be needed in the future; we must develop safer and more secure methods for its utilization. Those methods will take years to develop. We need to start now.

Comments

[James Aach]

While I can't speak to the reprocessing issue directly, you might be interested to know there is a new techno-thriller novel about the American nuclear power industry, written by a longtime nuclear engineer (me). This book provides an entertaining and accurate portrait of the nuclear industry today and how a nuclear accident would be handled. It is called “Rad Decision”, and is at RadDecision.blogspot.com. There is no cost to readers.

While there will be next-generation nuclear plants soon, today's reactors will also be around for the next twenty years, and the better they are understood, the more you'll understand and appreciate the improved designs of the new units.

Http://RadDecision.blogspot.com

[Robert]

In your post, you wrote:

The current policy has been in force since 1977. On April 7 of that year, Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would no longer reprocess spent nuclear fuel.

To support this, you cite Frontline the website of which has this "Brief History of Presidential Actions" that suggests that Carter, not Ford, stopped reprocessing.

The Frontline website doesn't appear to provide links to the Carter and Ford policy statements. But the Nuclear Control Institute has apparently posted scans of the Ford and Carter policy statements on its website.

My take: Ford, to his credit, started the reprocessing deferral, and Carter, to his credit, extended the deferral by making it indefinite.

While Ford's October 1976 policy statement reprocessing deferral was not indefinite, his deferral decision, the reasoning behind it, the government actions he ordered to implement his decisions, the actions he encouraged other governments to take to stem reprocessing-related exports -- all of these things certainly marked a considerable change in American energy and export policy. (What's been declassified in relation to the Fri Study suggests that the magnitude of the change, and the deliberation behind Ford's decision, was not at all insignificant.)

Carter's April 1977 policy statement went further, making America's deferral of plutonium indefinite. That, too, was a big deal.

I'm not trying to be partisan here -- I just think both presidents deserve credit for the respective changes that they decided to make.

At any rate, anyone interested in the history of reprocessing should read the statements for themselves. The history behind all of this is becoming increasingly important for us to recall and understand.

[CKR]

Robert - Thanks for the correction and the links.

The Ford deferral was of the commercialization of nuclear reprocessing in the United States. Carter's declaration ended all work on reprocessing.

I was relying on my memory of what I was doing at that time, which was research on reprocessing. [It looks like Google Scholar has picked up an abstract on one of the reports on this work. Someone else has referenced that work more recently.]

There were a number of other publications and a patent, which, as I recall, was issued at about the same time as Carter's statement. So that was what stuck in my mind. I'm vaguely recalling now that during the time between the two statements I visited the Barnwell (South Carolina) plant, which was to have been the first commercial reprocessing plant in the US and therefore the object of Ford's statement. Construction activity was suspended, but the plant was not yet shut down. That happened with Carter's statement.

Thank you for the texts of the statements. Ford's in particular refers indirectly to the quandry that still faces us in Iran: a peaceful nuclear fuel cycle can easily be switched over to making weapons materials. It also provides the potential solution to that quandry: limited availability of enrichment and reprocessing services with ironclad guarantees of the availability of those services to the countries that forgo them. What kind of world would we have now if the US had gone ahead strongly with Ford's suggestions?

The approach to nonproliferation has generally been nonpartisan. It's indeed useful to read the two statements and recall how we once looked at these issues. Similarly, it's useful to recall the almost-universal horror at the thought of using nuclear weapons, including Mikhail Gorbachev's and Ronald Reagan's feelings that nuclear weapons should be eliminated.

We seem to have come a long way from those feelings of the Cold War. Perhaps it's that we no longer face nuclear destruction in the same way. Perhaps it's that we no longer see our government addressing these issues in a nonpartisan way.