What will be Yucca’s need?

Launce Rake and Lisa Mascaro

Tuesday, June 27, 2006 | 8:38 a.m.

The Senate is quietly working on a plan for recycling nuclear waste that would lead to a new generation of nuclear power plants and affect the future of Yucca Mountain. The question of how it would affect Yucca is subject to debate.

The Senate plan, expected to be unveiled today, closely follows the nuclear recycling initiative the Bush administration put forth last winter. The objective is to create a new method of reprocessing the waste from nuclear power plants.

Advocates of the plan say it would allow waste to be recycled many more times than is the case with existing reprocessing technology. The new method also would accomplish two other feats:

Republican Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico, the leading nuclear energy advocate in Congress, is expected to present the plan today at a Senate appropriations subcommittee meeting. That plan will include federal funding to try to develop the new technology.

Backers, including Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, say the program would revitalize the moribund nuclear-power-plant construction industry by removing a major question that has stalled it for decades - how to store nuclear waste that will remain toxic for tens of thousands of years.

Nuclear power is especially attractive at a time when scientists believe the Earth is warming because of the burning of fossil fuels, advocates say.

But as critics of the reprocessing plans note - and supporters concede - it depends on a pair of technologies - the recycling process and the "fast" nuclear reactors that could burn the new kind of fuel.

The recycling process has been tried only in a laboratory setting.

Critics charge that both technologies are unproven on a commercial scale. Developing them could cost tens of billions of dollars and take decades. Worse, the critics say, the plan would give a green light to building nuclear reactors with the potentially empty promise that highly toxic nuclear waste will be a thing of the past.

Just what this does to the proposed Yucca Mountain repository as the final resting place for nuclear waste is an open question.

Advocates of the Bush plan, known as the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, say it will reduce pressure on Yucca. About 60,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste has already been produced by the nuclear industry, and it is ultimately supposed to be transported to and stored beneath the mountain 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

But with the new technology, much of that waste would be turned into fuel, and the remaining waste would be decay more quickly, so more waste could be stored in the mountain, Energy Department officials argue.

Opponents, however, say they have heard all of this before - and that recycling and reprocessing nuclear waste will lead to even more highly radioactive garbage dumped on Las Vegas' doorstep, potentially without the much-debated safeguards already in place for the proposed repository.

Yucca Mountain or another permanent dump site would still be needed, but the volume of nuclear waste would be reduced, advocates say.

Another issue is the money involved. Some in Congress see the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership as competing for funds and momentum that could be of use in developing Yucca. Although the House cut the president's $250 million request for GNEP in half, Domenici has vowed to restore the funding on the Senate side.

Some Yucca opponents would see that as a short-term victory, calling it a way to put Yucca on the "back burner." House Appropriations Committee members expressed that concern last month when they cut the administration's GNEP request.

If GNEP does undercut Yucca funding, "I suppose that's good news for us and Yucca Mountain. Let 'em have it," says Bob Loux, executive director of the state's Agency for Nuclear Projects, which opposes Yucca.

But other Yucca opponents see a long-term threat posed by GNEP because it would add to the stream of nuclear waste that ultimately would be deposited at Yucca Mountain.

"When you talk about the president's GNEP proposal, all roads lead back to Nevada," says David Cherry, spokesman for Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev. "There has never been a discussion about process waste that didn't have waste going to Yucca Mountain."

Ivan Oerlich, an analyst with the advocacy group Federation of American Scientists, says the program just isn't needed: There are adequate supplies of uranium to fuel reactors worldwide. Also, producing recycled fuel costs much more than mining new uranium. Finally, Oerlich says, the new process still would produce large amounts of radioactive waste.

One of Southern Nevada's most prominent scientists and academics, former UNLV President Donald Baepler, sees much to like in the GNEP plan. Baepler is working to bring a reprocessing test plant to Nye County .

Baepler says 98 percent of spent nuclear fuel could still be burned in the fast reactors. Without recycling, the 98 percent that is usable, along with the 2 percent that isn't, would end up in storage, potentially in Yucca Mountain, he says.

"It actually is a very practical solution to what you do with all these spent fuel rods," says Baepler.

Baepler is working with scientists and nuclear engineers to establish a pilot plant. Their company, the Nevada Environmental Research and Monitoring Institute, is vying for a share of $20 million in federal funds that would be used to do preliminary analysis of four sites around the country. The sites ultimately would form the backbone of the GNEP program.

"The big commercial operation to handle the spent fuel rods" would be 20 years down the road, Baepler says. Nevada has many of the things the federal government will be looking for in such a site, Baepler notes.

Many of the same factors went into the selection of Yucca Mountain as a dump site: train and highway access, availability of a lot of electric power, a stable geology. "Nothing horribly complex," he says, adding that the plant would pump $1 billion to $2 billion into Southern Nevada.

"It's an economic asset, is what it is," Baepler says.