Experts say recycling won’t eliminate need for repository

Suzanne Struglinski

Friday, June 17, 2005 | 9:07 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Opponents of Yucca Mountain should not pin their hopes on nuclear waste recycling being an alternative to the dump, judging from experts' testimony to a congressional subcommittee Thursday.

They testified that there is no rush for the Energy Department to begin recycling nuclear waste.

And even if a renewed push results in the department picking a method to recycle waste, recycling the waste may reduce the amount of used fuel but it will not reduce the need for a geologic repository such as nuclear dump set for Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, the experts told the members of Congress.

Recycling would work like this: Once nuclear fuel rods can no longer be used inside a reactor, they could be sent to a reprocessing plant so the uranium and plutonium could be separated and removed. A small amount of leftover "fission products" or high-level radioactive waste that remain would still need to go to a permanent storage site, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute.

Former President Jimmy Carter banned nuclear fuel reprocessing in 1977 based on concerns the plutonium could be stolen and used in nuclear weapons. Former President Ronald Reagan lifted the ban in the 1981, but the reprocessing of commercial spent nuclear fuel was not economically viable at that time because new power plants were being built or even ordered.

The government opted instead for storage of used nuclear fuel in the crust in the Earth and has solely been pursing the proposed facility at Yucca Mountain since 1987.

But because of delays on the Yucca project, which is now not scheduled to open until 2012 or 2015, Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, included an additional $5.5 million for the administration's Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative in the House version of the 2006 energy and water spending bill. The initiative is a study of how to recycle fuel without creating dangerous by-products said Robert Shane Johnson, acting director of the Energy Department's Nuclear Energy office.

"In the longer term future, these technologies, in combination with advanced nuclear reactor technologies hold the promise of deferring, perhaps indefinitely, the need for a second repository, while reducing the inventory of civilian plutonium,"said Johnson, at a House Science Committee's Energy Subcommittee hearing Thursday.

Hobson, who heads the House Appropriations Energy and Water Development Subcommittee, wants the department to select an advanced reprocessing technology and start a competitive process to select one or more sites to develop integrated spent fuel recycling facilities by the end of 2007.

But Matthew Bunn, a senior research associate in the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard University, called a near-term decision to go back to reprocessing "a serious mistake" because it would increase the cost of nuclear waste management, still pose proliferation, safety and terrorism risks and only provide limited relief from future volumes of spent fuel.

"Reprocessing by itself does not make any of the nuclear waste go away," Bunn said. "Whatever course we choose, we will still need a nuclear waste repository such as Yucca Mountain."

Hobson's main reason for promoting a new look at reprocessing it to avoid getting to "Yucca Mountain 2" as long as possible. Under law, once Yucca opens it can only hold 77,000 tons of nuclear waste. Congress would have to change the law to allow it to hold more, which the department says it can, or the country will need a second repository. Hobson believes getting on a better reprocessing track will reduce the amount of waste that will go into Yucca.

Although Bunn pointed out the size of the repository is not determined by the volume of waste, but its temperature. Recycled plutonium is hotter than regular waste and would need a larger repository.

"It is a good thing there is no rush, as we simply do not have the information that would be needed to make a decision on reprocessing in 2007," Bunn said.