Scientist: French keeping open mind on nukes

Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2001 | 10:25 a.m.

AMARGOSA VALLEY -- Instead of zeroing in on a single remote site to study for dumping highly radioactive waste, a French scientist said his country is keeping an open mind on options ranging from reprocessing to storing the spent nuclear reactor fuel.

Geochemist Jean-Claude Duplessy, who reviews France's nuclear waste management efforts, said a final report is due in 2006 on what direction the country will take in handling its radioactive waste problem.

Duplessy said he oversees the French panel similar to the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an independent scientific committee watching the Department of Energy's efforts at Yucca Mountain.

Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the only U.S. site under study to become the world's first high-level nuclear waste repository. The technical review board is meeting in Amargosa Valley through today.

France is weighing transforming the waste into less toxic material in a process called transmutation, Deplussy told the board. The United States, on the other hand, is starting to review new transmutation technology developed at DOE's Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico this year. But American scientists criticize the $34 million price tag and length of time to develop the process.

Deplussy said the French solution might allow nuclear power plants to reprocess the waste, either recovering uranium fuel for reactors or allowing smaller amounts to be buried in stable granite.

The French program puts the burden of containing the radioactivity squarely on the rock. The French are not designing waste containers, shields to protect the buried casks or gravel or cement shoved around the metal alloy canisters, as the DOE has proposed for Yucca Mountain.

One granite site has already been canceled, because ground water moved too fast through it, he said.

Critics of a Yucca Mountain repository have noted for years that there is too much water in the volcanic tuff that makes up the mountain, and the ground water moves too fast through its rock to keep radioactivity from 77,000 tons of waste safe for 10,000 years.

Steve Frishman, technical adviser to the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, said the DOE once relied on the mountain to contain the waste, but currently 98 percent of containing the waste rests with manmade barriers such as containers and shields.

Nye County Commissioner Jeff Taguchi said he was impressed with the French approach to managing nuclear waste. "You can't cut through granite," he said. "Our stuff you can cut like a hot knife through butter."