Removing the sting from nuclear waste

Sunday, April 4, 1999 | 10:03 a.m.

Scientists at the Department of Energy, UNLV and across the country are working to transform dangerous nuclear elements into less harmful ones instead of burying highly radioactive waste inside Yucca Mountain.

The process of transforming elements of matter is called transmutation. Such a change at the atomic level requires a great deal of electrical energy and money, two reasons the idea has never left the laboratory. Yet many scientists say the process is cheaper than burying all the high-level nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years.

The concept, which has been quietly researched at government labs since nuclear energy was developed in the 1940s, became public last month when Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., proposed changing the nation's nuclear waste management policy to include dedicated funds for transmutation research.

As chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Domenici is proposing a bill to link nuclear waste disposal to funding for transmutation technology. Domenici, who also chairs the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations subcommittee, supported a bill last year to store high-level nuclear waste at the Nevada Test Site until a permanent repository is ready.

But now he says he supports transmutation as an alternative to a permanent repository for highly radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain because it is impossible to prove Yucca, an old volcano, is safe.

In February, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson first offered transmutation as an alternative to burying 77,000 tons of commercial and defense wastes that could end up in Yucca Mountain after 2010, if the site passes scientific muster. It was the first time the DOE had ever offered an alternative to a high-level nuclear waste dump.

The technology does not eliminate the need for a repository, but the most dangerous nuclear materials would be transformed into lower-level waste that would lose its radioactivity in 300 years or less, as opposed to more than 24,000 years without the technology.

The main obstacle for transmutation is finding the funds for research and development. Most of the government's nuclear waste funding has gone to study Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The Senate requested $15 million for transmutation in 1999 but the House failed to put a penny toward any research. In a compromise budget, the project received $4 million, thanks to Domenici.

Domenici has not requested any new funding for transmutation yet, but DOE scientists say the research can be done for hundreds of millions of dollars, instead of the billions it will take to build a high-level waste repository at Yucca Mountain. The $4 million given to the DOE this year is barely enough to keep the laboratory doors open.

Transmutation is just now surfacing as a serious alternative to burying the bulk of the commercial U.S. nuclear waste load because scientists are raising doubts about Yucca Mountain as a permanent repository.

One objection to Yucca is that DOE researchers have discovered that ground water travels through the porous mountain in less than 500 years. The current regulation for protecting people and the environment from radiation exposure says that contaminated water should not escape the repository in less than 1,000 years.

Then there is the threat posed by future earthquakes. Nevada is the third most seismically active state in the nation, behind California and Alaska. Scientific concerns intensified after a 5.6 magnitude quake rumbled through Little Skull Mountain, 12 miles from the repository site, on June 29, 1992.

Not all the threats come from nature. People in the next few hundred years could intrude into the repository, damaging many of the waste containers and barriers and releasing harmful radiation into the environment.

But the nuclear industry is keeping pressure on the DOE to come up with a waste disposal solution quickly. Several utilities have sued the agency for failing to take the radioactive wastes off their hands, and industry lobbyists are pushing hard for Congress to move waste from power plants to the Nevada Test Site until Yucca Mountain is ready.

The DOE has proposed a compromise in which it would take responsibility for the tons of radioactive waste sitting at nuclear power plants while it comes up with the final solution, but most nuclear-powered utilities oppose the plan. Only three have shown any willingness to compromise, although one of them is the nation's largest, Commonwealth Edison of Chicago.

Scientists say chances of success on transmutation research are good. The main question is whether the process can be cost-effective and how quickly it can be made available to take care of the nuclear waste stockpiles.

"Scientifically, we know how to do it, but can we engineer the process to do it cost-effectively so a $1 problem does not become a $1 million problem?" asked Michael Shay of the DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory at Richland, Wash. Shay is in charge of trying to answer that question about transmutation for Congress by September.

Developing transmutation technology would be a fraction of the cost of designing and creating a dump for highly radioactive materials at Yucca Mountain, said UNLV nuclear physicist Anthony Hechanova.

But no one -- including the administration, Congress or scientists at work on the nuclear waste project -- is willing to abandon Yucca Mountain and redirect that money to transmutation or any other alternative to burial.

Skepticism about costs

Transmutation critics fear that estimates of the low cost are optimistic, and that it will take too long -- up to 20 years -- to prove the technology.

The DOE vision for a post-transmutation repository includes the need for long-term storage -- up to 300 years -- but for a much smaller amount of waste and with much lower hazards from radiation exposure.

The National Academy of Science and Engineering in 1995 recommended continuing the deep geologic disposal program, along with "a sustained but modest and carefully focused research and development program" on transmutation technology.

Hechanova, however, says the possibilities are far greater.

If the United States develops transmutation, processing units could generate electricity while changing the waste to relatively harmless substances, said Hechanova, who prefers to call commercial radioactive wastes nuclear treasures instead of trash. His dream includes seven regional sites near current reactors where highly radioactive waste could be changed into energy and less harmful byproducts.

The dream of transmutation is as old as science, going back to ancient alchemists, who tried to change lead to gold. The late nuclear physicist and chemist Glenn Seaborg accomplished it on a small scale in his laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., transforming a minute amount of lead to gold. He also was the first to create plutonium from uranium.

Transmutation of nuclear materials works like a pile of rocks perched on a mountain above a town. The pile threatens to bury the town in an avalanche unless the boulders are scattered in other directions.

Transmutation is the process that scatters that rock pile. A swarm of neutrons, created by protons energized in an accelerator to move at high speed, smashes into the radioactive elements, changing their basic structure.

The remaining pounds of radioactive material become harmless in less than 300 years, said Greg Van Tuyle, project leader at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Without transmutation, highly radioactive nuclear wastes such as plutonium and neptunium take from 24,500 years to 2.3 million years to become harmless.

While the idea has been around since the dawn of the nuclear age, the technology has not come far because funding was not dedicated to pursue it, said James Bresee, the DOE's transmutation project leader in Washington, D.C. "My guess is we're 10 years away on its effectiveness on the large scale," he said.

Meanwhile, other countries such as France, Japan, Sweden, Italy, Russia and the Czech Republic are ahead of the United States on the research, thanks to a foreign penchant for reprocessing nuclear wastes. They are not transforming the waste but recycling it, purifying used radioactive fuel so that it can be reused.

The United States has not allowed commercial utilities to reprocess nuclear wastes for fear that in the process terrorists could get enough radioactive materials to make a weapon.

But transmutation does not reprocess the nuclear materials so they may be used again, explained David Hill at Argonne National Laboratory's western branch in Idaho. Hill is in charge of ensuring that whatever process is used for transmutation, it does not create a nuclear chain reaction.

Instead, through the use of a high-speed accelerator to make the neutrons energetic enough, the harmful radioactive materials are zapped in a "once-through destruction" process, he said. It sounds like magic, but it's science.

Transmutation, however, will not work for an estimated 7,000 tons of defense wastes, which are not solid and are very unstable, Bresee said. That waste must be converted to glass logs or encased in ceramic logs to be safe enough to move, then buried deep underground.

But for the 70,000 tons of commercial waste for which the process might work, project leaders such as Bresee and Van Tuyle believe that transmutation can be made feasible in five years. In a second phase, a prototype would be built at existing laboratories for several hundred million dollars over 10 years.

Finally, a demonstration phase would require a unit a third the size of an average power plant -- about 1,000 megawatts -- for about the same price. All told, that's less than $1 billion and it would produce electricity which could be sold. So far the DOE has spent $6 billion on Yucca Mountain research alone.

The transmutation process, under this plan, could be ready for use within 20 years.

Easing terrorist threatBut shrinking the atomic waste destined for Yucca Mountain is not the sole reason for transmutation research. By transforming nuclear materials to harmless matter worldwide, terrorists or rogue countries could not get their hands on radioactive building blocks for bombs, because weapons-grade uranium plutonium and other radioactive elements would no longer exist.

If the United States is first to perfect the process, other nuclear countries such as Russia could also whittle radioactive wastes away by using U.S. technology.

The biggest issue blocking transmutation's development is the the U.S. nuclear-waste management program, which officially backs burial. Scientists must convince Congress to change the policy if transmutation is to have a future.

Congress has not changed its position to bury nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain since enacting the 1987 Nuclear Waste Policy Act Amendments, singling out the mountain as the sole site to study as a national high-level nuclear waste repository.

If Domenici is successful in changing the direction of nuclear waste policy and finds funding to develop transmutation, his bill will likely be supported by Sens. Richard Bryan and Harry Reid, Nevada Democrats who have succeeded for years in blocking attempts to move any nuclear waste to Nevada.

"Transmutation is an interesting way to manage waste because it reduces the amount you have to deal with and reduces its hazardous period from hundreds of thousands of years to several hundred years," Reid said.

"I am not opposed to taking a look at any policy that takes us away from the idea that the way to deal with the waste is to 'bury and forget it.' "

Reid is adamant that no nuclear wastes come to Nevada, temporarily or permanently. And he realizes that research dollars on transmutation will go to existing DOE labs -- probably Los Alamos in Domenici's home state of New Mexico. Yet he supports new research funds.

"The more we spend on new research, the less there will be for interim storage at the Test Site and permanent storage at Yucca Mountain," Reid said.

The Domenici proposal is almost certain to find support in fellow New Mexico Sen. Jeff Bingaman, a Democrat and ranking minority member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

"It is becoming increasingly clear to many of us that the legislative path we have been on for the last two Congresses is coming to a dead end," Bingaman said recently.

"I think the time has come for some new thinking and a fresh approach to this old problem," Bingaman told the National Journal's Congress Daily, a congressional newsletter published daily on Capitol Hill.

But support for transmutation is not as solid at the state level -- not as long as Yucca Mountain remains a potential burial site. Pushing for transmutation might put Nevada in a position where it would have to negotiate on the temporary storage issue. That is because a logical site for an experimental transmutation accelerator -- which would need a supply of nuclear waste -- would be the Nevada Test Site, and Congress is already eyeing the Test Site as a place for temporarily storing nuclear waste.

Nevada officials fear that any sign of weakness in the state's solid opposition to storing or burying high-level nuclear waste -- either permanently or temporarily -- would invite the DOE to begin rolling truckloads of radioactive rods to the Test Site for storage as soon as 2003.

State leaders argue that if Nevada indicates in any way it is willing to accept high-level nuclear waste -- even for transmutation -- shipments will begin sooner and stay forever.

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