Friday, Aug. 6, 1999 | 10:36 a.m.
The fate of alternatives to dumping 70,000 tons of highly radioactive waste into Yucca Mountain lies within the proposed Senate Energy and Natural Resources budget.
Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., has proposed a bill that creates an Office of Spent Nuclear Fuel Research within the Department of Energy. The proposed office would develop demonstration programs for treating, recycling and disposal of high-level nuclear waste from commercial power reactors and defense activities.
The United States currently has only one solution for high-level nuclear waste left from power generators and weapons work -- bury it inside Yucca Mountain by 2010.
The Domenici proposal is expected to go to a congressional conference committee later this year.
Part of the research effort involves shrinking the nuclear waste pile. A process called transmutation, which changes dangerous radioactive materials into less toxic ones, would not replace the need for a repository, Domenici has said.
But instead of guarding high-level nuclear waste buried in a repository for 300,000 years the remaining radioactive materials would drop to harmless levels in less than 300 years, scientists say. Domenici is asking for $125 million over five years for research on transmutation. The DOE has already spent $6.5 billion for studies at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
"Transmutation does not replace the need for a repository," Domenici spokesman Pete Lyons said. "It dramatically changes the radiotoxicity of the materials."
Nuclear physicist Anthony Hechanova of the Harry Reid Center at UNLV said that transmutation, a process combining a nuclear accelerator with a nuclear reactor, may become a high-tech solution to the high-level radioactive waste problem.
It's a question of economics and costs.
"You want my opinion," Hechanova told the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Club of Southern Nevada Thursday night at the Barrick Natural History Museum. "It's all economically driven."
Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and other DOE facilities such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., Sandia in Albuquerque, Argonne in Illinois and universities such as MIT and the Institute for Power Physics and Engineering in Obninsk, Russia, have discovered a workable solution for radioactive substances with half lives as long as 15.7 million years, Hechanova said.
For example, the problem with Iodine-129 is its radioactive life disrupts thyroid gland activity. And after 15.7 million years, half of its radiation remains as potent as ever. Transmuting Iodine-129 would destroy it.
The Russians offered DOE laboratories a way to contain the transmutation process itself, Hechanova said. By combining liquid lead and bismuth in a "blanket," the Russians confined the transmutation process. Los Alamos pieced together the current transmutation scheme within the past two years.
Instead of burying 70,000 tons of uranium -- 96 per cent of the waste destined for Yucca Mountain -- that U-235 could be extracted and reused in nuclear power generation, Hechanova said. With transmutation working its proven scientific magic on the remaining wastes, 400 tons of radioactive materials are left and can be contained and watched for 300 years, he said. There's less chance of a failure of container or repository in 300 years, compared to 300,000 years when the radioactivity reaches its peak inside a repository.
Los Alamos scientists have written a 20-year plan for building a demonstration accelerator by 2015. "The question is, can you turn something from paper into reality," Hechanova said. "It's not easy."
The Los Alamos plan includes the reactor with the accelerator where the transmutation would occur. The reactor generates electricity, 90 percent of it for sale in a deregulated energy market. The other 10 percent of its power operates the accelerator. The DOE estimates 15 accelerator/reactors could churn seven reactors' worth of waste through the transmutation process.
"I have absolutely no doubt that if we threw all of our resources into this technology, we'd have it in 15 years," Hechanova said.
The DOE will know later this year if it can begin to pour research money into accelerator transmutation after both houses of Congress and the president agree on a budget.
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