Sunday, Feb. 26, 2006 | 8:21 a.m.
Washington
The Bush administration's revival this month of a decades-old proposal to reprocess nuclear waste startled many of the nation's top scientists. They view the concept as virtually unworkable because of the enormous costs involved and its reliance on unproven science and technology that would at best take decades to develop.
The real purpose of the initiative, these scientists say, is political - and it has everything to do with Yucca Mountain.
In a few years, the nuclear industry will have produced enough waste to fill the proposed 70,000-ton capacity repository. At that point, the nation will face bruising fights over more nuclear waste repositories, even as the 20-year-old battle over Yucca drags on.
Reprocessing, or "recycling" waste, will eliminate the need for more repositories - and unwinnable political wars - for the next 100 years, they say.
"My view is this is driven by Yucca Mountain, in part because it is kicking the can down the road," said Frank von Hippel, director of the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University.
That "can" is the waste problem. But reprocessing technology does not hold the promise that Bush administration officials say it does, perhaps even far down the road, critics say.
"They might throw a few billion dollars at it," said Edwin Lyman, senior staff scientist in the global security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, "but I think ultimately it is going to sink under the weight of logic and all the plan's inconsistencies."
At its very heart, the proposal depends on developing a "technological unicorn," said Robert Alvarez, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies. He said he doubts that the administration itself has faith in the idea.
"I don't know if these guys are believing this," said Alvarez, who served as a senior policy adviser to the energy secretary in the Clinton administration. "If they do, they are fabulists. If they don't, it's a cynical gesture ..."
President Bush unveiled the reprocessing proposal while calling for a new commitment to nuclear energy - an industry "renaissance," some call it - in his State of the Union Address last month.
Since then, his administration has promoted the idea not only as an answer to nuclear waste storage problems but also to the dangers of nuclear weapons proliferation.
The Energy Department's 2007 budget includes a plan to advance reprocessing from its long-standing conceptual phase to engineering in the next decade. Toward that end, the Bush administration has asked Congress for $250 million in start-up money, and it intends to ask for significantly more before Bush leaves office in 2009.
The concept of recycling spent fuel is as old as nuclear power plants.
The industry's biggest problem has always been that plants produce some of the nastiest material on Earth - highly radioactive spent uranium fuel rods that come out of the reactors every 18 to 24 months.
The drawback of modern-day recycling, which is practiced in a few nations, including France, is that the process separates out plutonium - which could eventually find its way into the hands of terrorists or rogue nations.
The United States experimented with reprocessing from 1966 to 1972 at a plant at West Valley, N.Y., developed by a subsidiary of Getty Oil. The plant was closed because the operation was too expensive and faced big regulatory hurdles. It also produced more than 600,000 gallons of highly radioactive liquid waste as a byproduct of the reprocessing.
President Jimmy Carter banned the process altogether in 1979 out of concern about plutonium falling into the wrong hands.
At that point, Congress took another approach to waste - burial, which led eventually to Yucca Mountain. As the Yucca plan trudged forward over the years, reprocessing essentially remained dormant, until Bush took office.
Earlier this month, Energy officials described the new plan. They said they aim to develop two unproven technologies, known as UREX-plus and pyroprocessing.
In theory, those technologies would reprocess spent nuclear fuel in a way that did not separate out plutonium.
Those technologies would essentially burn up much of the radioactive material from spent nuclear fuel rods. The remaining material could be recycled again and again into fuel. Eventually, the waste would reach a point when it could not be recycled. It would then go to Yucca.
The effect would be a decline in the amount of waste heading to Yucca and a reduction in the toxicity of that waste. Also, Energy Department officials say, the nuclear energy industry would have a new technology that all but eliminates the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.
At that point, said Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, the world would be poised for nuclear energy nirvana, "the promise of virtually limitless energy to emerging economies around the globe."
To be sure, reprocessing has strident advocates, including scientists at Argonne National Laboratory, which stands to gain from research into reprocessing.
"Waste minimization" is a leading benefit, said Phillip Finck, deputy associate laboratory director of applied science and technology and national security at Argonne, which is operated by the University of Chicago for the Energy Department.
"By processing spent nuclear fuel and recycling the hazardous radioactive materials, we can reduce the waste disposal requirements enough to delay the need for a second repository until the next century, even in a nuclear energy growth scenario," Finck told a congressional panel in June.
The cost of reprocessing would be minimal if spread over decades and shared by millions of electricity ratepayers, said Roger Gale, a consultant and former Energy Department official, another believer in the technology.
"If we are going to pursue a new generation of nuclear plants, this is just the right time to be facing these considerations," said Gale, a former Yucca Mountain director.
Those arguments have won allies on Capitol Hill, including Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, a powerful member of the Appropriations Committee, and Senate Energy Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., the Senate's leading nuclear power advocate.
"I believe what we can do with the fuel cycle in the next 20 years can amaze the world," Domenici said in a recent speech in Washington.
But reprocessing is destined for debate this year in Congress, where it will face opposition from lawmakers and scientists who do not believe the new technology could reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation.
"I don't think it holds up to the claims that the administration has made about it," Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., told Bodman at a hearing this month.
Reprocessing critics note that it is controversial among the leading scientists who understand it best. They say it would be prohibitively expensive and take many decades to develop.
A National Academy of Sciences study panel found in 1996 that the cost of developing a reprocessing technology "easily could be more than $100 billion."
A 1999 report by Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists projected that reprocessing could cost as much as $279 billion to develop - over a period as long as 118 years. That cost includes developing a new generation of nuclear reactors because reprocessed waste could not be used by conventional nuclear plants.
The Los Alamos Laboratory is part of the Energy Department, but Energy officials are not advertising those projections in their current plan.
"Clearly, these are not politically correct numbers," said Lyman, of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Other scientists say the Bush plan makes a host of suspect assumptions.
"There is a big difference between understanding the physics of something and making a factory that runs efficiently and works," said Ivan Oelrich, director of the Strategic Security Project at the Federation of American Scientists.
"In theory, it works brilliantly, and I have no doubt that in 100 years it will work beautifully. The problem now is there is a tremendous sense of urgency. It has this insanely accelerated schedule. We can put this off for decades."
Alvarez, of the Institute for Policy Studies, said, "I don't know if there is any adult supervision going on over there - there's no peer review. What you have is a lot of marketing that has suddenly turned into policy."
Scientists also doubt that reprocessing would create a waste stream that terrorists would not find attractive, even if the science and technology were better developed.
When Energy Department officials disclosed the plan, Deputy Secretary Clay Sell conceded that while the technology held the promise of "significant nonproliferation benefits," he noted that those benefits were "hard to quantify."
In fact, the reprocessing technology the Energy Department wants to pursue is not that different from modern-day reprocessing method known as PUREX, which separates plutonium and thus creates a risk, said Princeton's von Hippel. The idea that reprocessing can help resist proliferation "is a fraud," von Hippel said.
Von Hippel said he met with Sell and one of Sell's top advisers recently to explain how the technology envisioned by Energy would still create a dangerous proliferation risk. As he spoke, von Hippel said, Sell's adviser interrupted and said, "Yeah, yeah, we know that."
"And Clay Sell looked at him and said, 'I didn't know that,' " von Hippel recalled.
"They're spinning that they have something that is going to get them out of this problem in a clean way," von Hippel said.
"They say technology will come to the rescue, and they're not interested in facing the ugly truth."
Sell could not be reached for comment. Energy spokesman Craig Stevens said this week that Hippel's "inference that the deputy secretary didn't know the full breadth of the proliferation concern is simply not true."
Stevens reiterated the department's belief that new reprocessing technologies could curtail proliferation and eventually lead to a global resurgence of nuclear power and "a virtually inexhaustible power supply to growing and developing nations around the world."
Benajamin Grove can be reached at (202) 662-7436 or at [email protected].
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