Nuke plan is called science fiction

Benjamin Grove

Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2006 | 8:19 a.m.

WASHINGTON - Wrapped inside the 2007 Energy Department budget proposal is a provocative question: Can U.S. scientists invent a solution to nuclear waste that would also curtail the spread of nuclear weapons?

The answer has implications ranging from national defense to the future of Yucca Mountain.

The Bush administration wants to put money into research immediately as part of a nuclear energy renaissance. Construction of the nation's last nuclear plant began 30 years ago.

Critics say the idea is pure science fiction. They are gearing up to oppose it in Congress.

"Reprocessing will perilously undermine U.S. nonproliferation efforts and will only exacerbate our nuclear waste problems," a coalition of environmental groups wrote to lawmakers last month.

The proposal is included in the $2.77 trillion federal budget President Bush sent to Congress on Monday. It included $23.5 billion for the Energy Department.

Bush's program is known as the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. It is intended to meet the world's unrelenting thirst for energy by developing new nuclear power plants in the United States and worldwide, with the United States leading in technology and lending nuclear fuel to other nations.

The program has the potential to do nothing less than "change the world," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said.

"The scale of what we're proposing to undertake is massive," said Clay Sell, Bodman's deputy, who is to help pitch the program to Congress.

The program depends on future development of two highly complex and expensive technologies.

One is a method of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel that makes it difficult to convert into plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. That form of reprocessing is known as "recycling."

The other technology required would be development of "fast" reactors that can use the recycled fuel.

Several other nations currently recycle nuclear waste. But they use existing technology, which separates out weapons-grade plutonium. If that plutonium fell into the wrong hands, it could be used to make nuclear weapons.

The as-yet undeveloped technology the Bush administration forsees would lessen the proliferation danger by effectively limiting the plutonium that is separated out, Energy Department officials said. They have requested $250 million for the nuclear partnership next year and will request considerably more in the next three years, with the goal of demonstrating the technology in 10 years.

The program has implications for Yucca because any new "fast" reactors ultimately would produce an unusable waste bound for the proposed permanent waste repository, Energy Department officials acknowledged.

That could include waste from foreign reactors if, as Bush proposes, the United States begins leasing uranium fuel to other nations then taking back the waste for disposal.

Energy Department officials say that if they could develop waste recycling, the 60,000 tons of waste already piled up at the nation's nuclear reactors could be recycled.

Recycled waste would be less toxic, so the underground Yucca repository could be redesigned to allow more waste storage in its tunnels, Energy officials said. The nation wouldn't need a second repository for another 100 years, they said.

It also means that the radioactive material inside Yucca would not be as serious a threat to the environment and human health, the officials said.

Critics dispute that.

One Public Citizen analyst has called recycling a "fairy tale." Developing the technology, and ultimately a recycling plant, would cost untold billions of dollars over decades, critics say. And even new recycling techniques still pose weapons proliferation risks, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Then there's Congress, which would have to pay for it.

Lawmakers are not expected to embrace a plan to accept foreign waste for burial at Yucca, especially when the repository program itself is badly behind schedule for accepting U.S. waste. Some Yucca advocates fear that Bush's new plan could take attention away from developing the repository.

The marginal disposal benefits of reprocessing are more than offset by high cost, risks to the environment and human health, and by the proliferation threat, former Clinton administration energy undersecretary Ernest Moniz and former CIA director John Deutch wrote in a Washington Post column last month, predicting "considerable" opposition in Congress.

Benjamin Grove can be reached at (202) 662-7436 or at grove@lasvegassun.com.