[ RadSafe ] Nature Editorial: reprocessing of nuclear fuel is an idea that should be laid to rest

[John Jacobus]

Editorial
Nature 439, 509-510 (2 February 2006)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7076/full/439509b.html

Recycling the past

The reprocessing of nuclear fuel is an idea that
should be laid to rest.

Plans to revive nuclear power are stirring on both
sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, Tony Blair's
government has been making upbeat noises about the
need to replace existing nuclear power plants to fend
off both national dependence on foreign sources of
energy and global warming.

In the United States, however, President George Bush
is said to be contemplating a step that will revive
public concern about the link between nuclear energy
and nuclear weapons — and could ultimately set back
any prospect of reviving the former.

When it is released next week, Bush's 2007 budget
proposal is expected to include a provision that would
start to revive nuclear-fuel reprocessing. That would
end a three-decade-old strategy in the United States
that has sought to sever the connection between
nuclear power and nuclear weapons.

Nuclear-fuel reprocessing aims to reduce the volume of
spent nuclear fuel that has to be disposed of safely
by recycling it for use in new types of nuclear
reactor. But the recycling involves separating
components that can readily be used to build nuclear
weapons.

Of the countries with significant nuclear power
capacity, the United States and Germany abandoned
reprocessing early on, and Britain, having ditched the
fast-reactor design that would burn the recycled fuel,
looks set to follow suit. Japan is trying to build a
reprocessing plant, but only France has stuck
resolutely with fuel recycling. An official study
commissioned by the French prime minister found
recycling to be costly, however, and France has not
yet managed to 'close' its fuel cycle by finding a
place to put its waste.

The United States had (and has) ultimate
responsibility for the nuclear-fuel cycle at plants
that have been built by US contractors around the
world. It abandoned reprocessing in a bid not just to
lead by example, but to prevent a situation whereby
countries that operate US reactor technology might
obtain access to plutonium production lines.

The decision to abandon recycling sought to put the
nuclear weapons genie back in the bottle in arguments
over nuclear energy, in the United States at least.
Bush's plan would release it again — and galvanize US
opposition to nuclear power. Its adoption by Congress
would effectively concede that US plans for the safe
long-term disposal of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain,
Nevada, are not going to solve the waste problem.

The plan to revive the nuclear-fuel cycle comes at a
peculiar time. The Pittsburgh-based company
Westinghouse, which constructed most of these US-built
plants, is being purchased by Toshiba for $5 billion.
This suggests that, in the eyes of some seasoned
Japanese business executives at least, general global
prospects for nuclear power are improving.

The case for a nuclear power revival has ben well
rehearsed. The global panic induced by the 1979
performances of Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas in The
China Syndrome — and inflamed by the real-life version
released at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania 11 days
later — is beginning to die down. European memories of
the 1986 Chernobyl accident are also fading.

Perhaps more to the point, the case now rests not on
the specious grounds that nuclear energy will be
immensely cheap, but on the rather more solid
supposition that it is less bad than the alternatives.
With coal causing global warming, oil and gas equated
with dangerous energy dependency on outside suppliers,
and renewable sources unable to produce the
gigawattage that we apparently require, nuclear power
is firmly back in the picture.

"The case for nuclear energy now rests on the
supposition that it is less bad than the
alternatives."

Yet the waste issue will need to be addressed before
any ground is broken for a new nuclear power station
in either Britain or America. Britain abandoned plans
to build an underground waste repository in the north
of England in 1997, and a report due this summer from
a consultative panel, the Committee on Radioactive
Waste Management, is only the first step in the search
for a new approach. In the United States, the outlook
for the Yucca Mountain project is uncertain, and the
proposed repository there is, in any case, too small
to meet forecast needs.

It may be that the Bush proposal reflects the
administration's frustration over continued opposition
to the Yucca Mountain repository. But, in the end, the
only environmentally or financially viable path to
nuclear power generation involves wrestling with the
murky details of long-term waste disposal. Fuel
recycling may look exciting on paper; in practice, it
is part of the problem, not the solution.

+++++++++++++++++++
"Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an email."  - Eliot Spitzer, New York state attorney general

-- John
John Jacobus, MS
Certified Health Physicist
e-mail:  crispy_bird at yahoo.com

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