Accelerators for nuclear waste outlined

Monday, Feb. 26, 2001 | 11:29 a.m.

Scientists at UNLV have come up with an alternative for waste from nuclear power plants that doesn't involve burying it in a proposed repository at Yucca Mountain.

A UNLV nuclear-engineering professor and two scientists from the Harry Reid Environmental Research Center outlined Friday, at the first of a series of town-hall meetings, their plan to snuff dangerous uranium and plutonium from nuclear wastes while making radioactive tracers for medicine and producing power.

The trouble is that no one -- not the Energy Department, which is studying the repository, nor the nuclear industry -- is paying attention to any alternatives to a repository, they said.

Congress in 1987 designated Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the only site to be studied to hold 77,000 tons of commercial and defense nuclear waste.

UNLV has received $3 million of a $34 million grant from Congress for research into advanced accelerators: powerful machines that could convert the most dangerous radioactive elements into something less harmful, according to Anthony Hechanova, a nuclear engineer.

The accelerator would speed up the process of radioactive decay to make the waste materials less dangerous and produce lower-level radioactive materials for medical uses and research, Hechanova said.

It differs from transmutation that bombards the highly radioactive materials and changes them to smaller amounts that still require a repository, although a smaller one, he said.

Transmutation leave nothing useful behind for medical treatments or laboratory research, he said.

A Yucca repository or the accelerator could be ready at the same time, by 2010, scientist Gary Cerefice said. For Yucca to work, more than 1,000 miles of tunnels must be drilled at a cost of $58 billion or higher.

"There's no free lunch," Cerefice said about managing nuclear wastes from reactors and defense activities. "It will always cost money to remove it to Yucca Mountain. Leaving it near the reactors also is expensive. The main cost of storing it on site are the guns, the guards and the gates."

Politically and economically, a Yucca repository is a huge problem, he said. If a single buried container leaks, the entire repository might have to be emptied to reach the problem.

"It would be expensive, and is it worth the risk?" Cerefice said.

William Culbreth, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, warned that a remote robotic system proposed by Energy Department to bury and retrieve the wastes has its limits.

"I think it is a big problem if there is a leak," Culbreth said. The heat generated by the radiation trapped in rock could halt remote retrieval vehicles and make it impossible for humans to survive the lethal atmosphere 1,000 feet beneath the surface.

As California and other Western states, including Nevada, face energy problems, the nuclear industry is trying to revive nuclear power, Cerefice said. That means extending operations of 40-year-old nuclear reactors another 20 years and creating more wastes, he said.

The United States is the only country taking the repository approach, Cerefice said.

Scientists once schemed to drop it beneath the world's ice sheets or bury it under the ocean or send it into space, he said.

The UNLV scientists say eight regional sites would be needed to process the nuclear wastes from U.S. power plants. That would drop transportation costs and shrink amounts of radioactive material. The technology could be ready in 10 years and render the wastes radioactive for 300 years, instead of 300,000 years, Hechanova said.

If eight accelerators were built, they could make medicines to treat cancer and pay for themselves by producing power, Hechanova said.

Why bury reactor wastes at all? Culbreth said. In a century, people may dig into Yucca Mountain looking for the plutonium and uranium for power generation.

But environmentalist groups such as Citizen Alert, a statewide watchdog, object to moving the wastes anywhere.