by CKR
In a speech at the Asia Society on February 22, President Bush introduced a new program, the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP).
The GNEP website is, for the most part, remarkably unspecific. It was most recently updated on 2/6/2006, which implies that it has been around barely longer than the Asia Society speech. It seems to be related to earlier reports of a budget item on nuclear fuel reprocessing (my commentary here and here)
According to the website, GNEP "builds on" (favorite bureaucratese) previous legislation intended to encourage more building of nuclear power plants in the United States. Given the administration's propensity for spin, I won't try to analyze that program from the writeup on the website and will leave it at that.
The elements of the GNEP program are listed as (I've numbered them for ease of discussion):
1. Expand Domestic Use of Nuclear Power
2. Demonstrate More Proliferation-Resistant Recycling
3. Minimize Nuclear Waste
4. Develop Advanced Burner Reactors
5. Establish Reliable Fuel Services
6. Demonstrate Small-Scale Reactors
7. Develop Enhanced Nuclear Safeguards
The overall scheme seems to be intended to provide a complete fuel cycle within the United States and offer enrichment, fuel fabrication and reprocessing services to other countries. As freqently happens within the Department of Energy, the larger vision has become captive to particular programs and political rhetoric.
Element 1 seems to be an effort to take credit for the earlier legislation one more time.
Elements 2 and 3 are restatements of each other. Reprocessing will result in less material to be stored in Yucca Mountain. The terms "separations" and "recycling" are more politicallly correct than "reprocessing," but I've been out of that particular loop for a while, so forgive me if I slip back into "reprocessing."
Although the GNEP website mentions "more proliferation-resistant separation processes," plural, it lists only one specifically: the UREX+ process under development at Argonne National Laboratory. The discussions make much of the fact that UREX+ keeps uranium and plutonium together, whereas the older PUREX process separates them, but it's that separation that's hard. Trust me; I have a patent on that separation.
Element 4 is something that reactor designers have been playing with for some time: to take those unseparated fissionable materials and burn them up in a nuclear reactor. I worked in a group that did systems studies on this in the 1970s. Argonne has a graphic identical to the one on the GNEP website.
Element 5 promises fuel services from "supplier nations" to other nations using nuclear power. It was this aspect of the GNEP that Bush emphasized in his Asia Society speech.
Under this partnership, America will work with nations that have advanced civilian nuclear energy programs -- such as Great Britain, France, Japan, and Russia -- to share nuclear fuel with nations like India that are developing civilian nuclear energy programs. The supplier nations will collect the spent nuclear fuel. And the supplier nations will invest in new methods to reprocess the spent nuclear fuel so that it can be used for advanced new reactors.The absurdity is that India currently reprocesses nuclear fuel and the United States does not. Siddarth Varadarajan provides one reaction to this proposal: incredulity.
At the time Bush made the Asia Society speech, the negotiation on the US-India Civil Nuclear Cooperation Initiative was hot and heavy. Bush's visit to India was scheduled for less than two weeks in the future, and agreement was far away. It is possible that Bush intended to put pressure on India, or it is possible that he believed that such an offer would be well received. Neither of these two expectations would have been realistic.
No nation wants to entrust its energy security to another. In 1946, the Baruch Plan offered internationalization of nuclear fuel processing under the United Nations. As the United States pressures Iran to give up the nuclear capabilities to which it is entitled under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty's Article IV, it is hard to believe that any nation would entrust its future energy security to the United States. India has been particularly proud of its independence in foreign policy.
Additionally, such a consortium will take time to develop, as will a full fuel cycle in the United States. Even if the UREX+ process proves successful in laboratory and pilot scale, full-scale operation is a decade or more away. It is not at all clear that the diplomatic groundwork has been laid for the consortium; a call for expressions of interest was issued on 19 April.
Element 6, like element 4, is a favorite of the reactor designers. The reactor pictured, IRIS, is being developed by an international consortium of twenty-one organizations from ten countries, led by Westinghouse Electric Company (scroll down). The IRIS home page was updated on 27 February, and there's not much behind that home page, so presumably the reactor is in an early stage of development.
Element 7 is the motherhood-and-apple-pie statement, again with few specifics. All the national laboratories have ideas on how to improve safeguards and will be happy to accept funding for them.
The GNEP appears to have hastily been drawn up. Information presented in congressional budget hearings on the GNEP has been sparse. No information was available on 5 April on estimated foreign contributions and full costs, nor was an overall research plan that would put fast reactors, reprocessing, and other proposed topics into context, according to an article in the 14 April issue of Science.
The GNEP faces a number of political hurdles. Within the United States, Congress will have to be convinced that reprocessing is a good idea. Convincing other nations that the United States will be a reliable supplier of nuclear fuel services will be a hard sell. The idea that India will be required to return foreign-supplied fuel for reprocessing will have to be clarified. Or will India be included as one of the nations supplying fuel services?
Another program with more fanfare than substance from the Bush administration.