Nuclear waste proliferation

Tuesday, July 11, 2006 | 7:28 a.m.

President Bush's proposal to consider helping Russia with its own version of Yucca Mountain won't diminish the administration's appetite for a nuclear waste dump in Nevada or soften the nuclear industry's push for a domestic disposal site, experts said Monday.

In fact, the administration's policy keeps the Nevada repository on the table as part of Bush's far-reaching, and some say unrealistic, strategy for a global nuclear renaissance.

As the president prepares for this week's G-8 summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, the administration has announced it is negotiating an agreement with Moscow that could send U.S. nuclear waste from overseas reactors to Russia. In exchange, Russian President Vladimir Putin would be expected to help block Iran's nuclear weapons program.

"This is another sort of example of the globalization of nuclear power," said Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies. "The Russians are looking to escape the isolation they've had in nuclear power, and the United States is looking to solve the foreign waste problem."

The U.S. deal would be a lucrative boost for Russia's ambitions as a leading nuclear-industry state. It would also resolve the administration's thorny problem of where to put the United States' spent nuclear fuel from across the globe, which has stymied nuclear energy expansion overseas much the way it has in this country.

The U.S. has control over nuclear fuel that originates in this country but is used overseas in such countries as South Korea and Taiwan and is responsible for it after it is used. Russia could be a final resting place for that nuclear waste.

Opening a waste site in Russia would help the Bush administration move forward with its Global Nuclear Energy Partnership - a controversial fuel recycling program that calls on nuclear states to produce energy for export in hopes of discouraging non-nuclear states from joining the nuclear club.

One of the many problems with that proposal has been what to do with all of the new waste - although experts also call recycling a potential boondoggle that will take decades to bring to fruition.

But nuclear policy experts are skeptical of Russia's ability to keep nuclear waste from falling into enemy hands . They point to polls that show the vast majority of Russians opposed to having that country become an international nuclear waste dump.

"The people who want to build these reactors will hold these up and say, 'We've solved the waste problem,' " said Kevin Kamps, nuclear waste specialist at the Nuclear Information and Resources Service. "But then reality intervenes. There's going to be huge problems encountered with this dump proposal."

Even with all of the problems facing Yucca Mountain - setbacks that now put its opening 20 years behind schedule - supporters continue to push for it as their best hope for handling the nation's spent fuel because the alternatives are even more problematic.

Experts said strict export and transit regulations would likely dissuade American nuclear energy companies from trying to ship domestic waste to Russia rather than wait for Yucca . Nuclear energy officials agree.

"Our material isn't going to go there," said Steven Kraft of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nation's leading industry advocacy organization.

In recent months, focus has shifted away from Yucca as a facility to house spent nuclear fuel and toward one that would take on recycled fuel under the president's GNEP plan .

Energy Department spokesman Craig Stevens said Monday the administration stands by Yucca Mountain as its key to handling the nation's waste. But he added that opening up Russia would certainly help the nuclear renaissance.

"It eliminates a major hurdle to expand nuclear energy throughout the world."