nuclear fuel rod reprocessing policy

http://www.chemcases.com/nuclear/nc-13.htm
Chemical Processes and Nuclear Reactor Fuel

Nuclear Chemistry
Recycling Spent Reactor Fuel

Dr. Frank Settle

There are about 557 nuclear power reactors in the world and about 440 are operating in early 2005.  These reactors have common elements that uranium oxide enriched to 3-4% ²³⁵U is fabricated into pellets then inserted into fuel rods.  These rods are neutron emitters and, in close proximity with each other, begin a self-sustaining chain reaction releasing energy and producing new elements by the fission of the uranium and producing plutonium (²³⁹Pu) by nuclear chain reactions. These fuel rods generally can supply energy from the fission reaction for 1-3 years.  They are then removed and replaced by new rods.

Spent fuel from nuclear reactors still contains considerable amounts of ²³⁵ U but now has generated significant ²³⁹Pu.  After 3 years in a reactor, 1,000 lbs. of 3.3-percent-enriched uranium (967 lbs. ²³⁸ U and 33 lbs. ²³⁵U) contain 8 lbs. of ²³⁵U and 8.9 lbs. of plutonium isotopes along with 943 lbs. of ²³⁸U and assorted fission products. Separating the ²³⁵U and ²³⁹Pu from the other components of spent fuel significantly addresses two major concerns. It greatly reduces the long-lived radioactivity of the residue and it allows purified ²³⁵U and ²³⁹Pu to be used as reactor fuel. (Courtesy of the Uranium Information Center)

Three options are available for cooled spent fuel rods; they can remain at the sites from which they have been removed from service, be moved to a more permanent site for storage or they can be reprocessed to remove the uranium and plutonium. In either case, these fuel rods must cool in storage ponds near the reactor for several months in order to reduce their short-lived radioactivity and to allow them to dissipate their initial high thermal energy. Reprocessing involves chopping up the fuel rods and dissolving the pieces. 

The plutonium and uranium are then removed and chemically  separated.  The byproducts of reprocessing, transuranic elements and fission products can be encapsulated in glass and disposed as waste. Gaseous diffusion or other processes can be used to enrich the uranium. The plutonium can be mixed with enriched uranium to make mixed oxide (MOX) reactor fuel. Purified plutonium can also be used for nuclear weapons. Great Britain and France have built large reprocessing plants to produce MOX fuel. They reprocess spent fuel not only from reactors in their respective countries, but also from reactors in other nations.

At one time, the United States planned to use a plutonium-uranium extraction (PUREX) process to for this separation.  But no spent fuel from nuclear power plants has been  reprocessed in the US.  In 1977 President Carter established national policy that prohibited reprocessing based on the premise that limiting plutonium would limit the spread of nuclear weapons around the world.  Although President Reagan reversed this policy, reprocessing has never been initiated in the US.

But in science, what can be done, will be done.  Local policy seldom deters the ambitions of the entire environment.

The French have reprocessed power plant spent fuel rods at the COGEMA LaHague site since 1966.  The French see reprocessing as ecologically sound, economical and profitable and as demonstrating scientific leadership on a world stage.

Quite naturally, the rise of organized terrorism since about 1990, culminating in the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York has focused attention on all aspects of nuclear material management.  As an example, the LaHague site was surrounded for a time by antiaircraft missiles for a time after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

In the US spent rods are currently stored at locations near the approximately 70 plants throughout the country. US fuel rod disposal planning anticipates opening a facility at Yucca Mountain, NV by 2012 for permanent burial of spent rods.

(Courtesy of the Department of Energy)

Complete Bibliography on Nuclear Power , Nuclear Waste  and Reprocessing from the ALSOS Digital Library for Nuclear Issues

Online NewsHour Special Report: North Korea: Nuclear Standoff
	A statement issued by the North Korean Foreign Ministry said it would continue to pursue its nuclear program because of the "hostile policy" of the United States toward the communist North. "(North Korea) successfully finished the reprocessing of some 8,000 spent fuel rods," said the statement, published by the official KCNA news agency. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Thursday the United States has no evidence North Korea has reprocessed the spent nuclear fuel rods."This is the third time they have told us they have just finished reprocessing the rods. We have no evidence to confirm that," Powell said at a news briefing. Pyongyang has pointed to the so-called "hostile" policy of the United States as a key reason for its January withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its decision to expel U.N. inspectors from its nuclear facilities.North Korea has said before that it completed reprocessing its pool of spent rods, but Thursday marked the first time it claimed to be using plutonium gathered from the rods to make nuclear weapons. The country's recent claims about its nuclear developments have not been independently confirmed."We will reprocess more spent fuel rods to be churned out in an unbroken chain from the 5 mw (megawatt) nuclear reactor in Yongbyon without delay when we deem it necessary," the statement said, referring to the North's nuclear plant.The statement also said North Korea "made a switchover in the use of plutonium churned out by reprocessing spent fuel rods in the direction (of) increasing its nuclear deterrent force." Analyses by diplomats and regional observers indicate that the North's statement fits a pattern of tactics intended to help its negotiating position in international talks."This is what North Korea always does before negotiating," Jin Canrong, an international relations expert at the People's University in Beijing, told Reuters. "They throw out a few new balls."The North's statement dismissed as groundless reports that more international talks could be held soon, similar to the six-way summit on the North's nuclear program held in late August by North and South Korea, Japan, the United States, Russia and China.But the North notably did not rule out the possibility for more talks altogether in its statement.South Korean Vice Unification Minister Cho Kun-shik said at a briefing in Seoul the North would respond to future calls for new talks."They are not in a position to oppose talks," he said.South Korea's Foreign Ministry urged the North in a statement not to take steps that would further escalate the situation."The North's announcement was very regrettable," South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman Shin Bong-kil said. "We are deeply concerned it not only undermines inter-Korean relations and efforts for the peaceful resolution of the nuclear issues but hurts the atmosphere for dialogue set by the previous talks."In his comments to reporters, Powell called on the North's neighbors to urge it to abandon its nuclear ambitions. "North Korea's neighbors should also be delivering a message to Kim Jong Il that the solution to the problem is for them to stop moving in this direction (and to) continue to participate in the diplomacy that is under way," Powell said. U.S. intelligence analysts have expressed concern that North Korea might have three, four or even six nuclear weapons instead of the one or two the Central Intelligence Agency now estimates, according to an Associated Press report. Powell said the United States was still willing to consider some security guarantees to ease the nuclear tensions with the North."We are examining ways ... to provide the kinds of security assurances that might help to move the process further along," he said. "We will continue to pursue diplomacy." The reprocessing of 8,000 rods could yield enough material to create 20 nuclear bombs, Yu Suk-ryul, a professor at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security in Seoul, told Reuters. But he said North Korea did not have the expertise to produce that many bombs -- perhaps five or six in about six months.

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POSTED 28 FEBRUARY 2008

Nuclear power's future: Reprocessing returns?
Is nuclear back? The growing energy shortage, combined with the fact of greenhouse warming, have sparked a flurry of interest in non-carbon energy sources, including nuclear energy. After all, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, nuclear is "Clean air energy."

The result is a sudden end to a 30-year drought in U.S. nuclear-plant applications. By February, 2008, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has received applications for six new reactors.

The long drought had several causes. Cost was one -- the last U.S. nuclear plants came in way late and way over budget, partly due to safety and regulatory changes following the 1979 meltdown at Three Mile Island. "One reason you saw the stall in nuclear building was that the uncertainty made investors much more cautious about getting involved," says Todd Allen, an assistant professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "There was a lack of certainty from the time of taking out a loan to selling electricity." Regulatory delays and design changes can eat up profits on such an expensive plant, he adds.

Reactor operators are now trying to control costs by standardizing their designs, and the NRC has promised faster regulatory decisions. Nuclear power makes about 20 percent of U.S. electricity, and about 16 percent globally.

But we see little cause for optimism about a second key source of the nuclear willies -- safe disposal of the intensely radioactive spent fuel that must be removed from reactors. The giant, federal nuclear-waste warehouse at Yucca Mountain, Nev. was supposed to solve the spent-fuel problem. But Yucca was scheduled to open 10 years ago, and it is unlikely to open for another 10 years -- if ever.

When a neutron hits a uranium-235 atom and causes it to split ("fission") in a nuclear reactor, we get fission products and "transuranics" (heavy elements like plutonium), along with more neutrons and a gob of energy.

With Yucca in limbo (some scientists say it cannot contain radwaste for 1 million years), the high-level waste problem remains unsolved.

So in the year that Yucca was supposed to celebrate its 10th birthday, here's our question: Who's got some good ideas for safely storing high-level nuclear waste?

These "dry casks" are an increasingly popular, but temporary, solution to radioactive waste storage at reactor sites. Photo: NRC

Radwaste: The original Mr. Yuck
High-level radwaste -- the yuck Yucca is slated to receive -- is spent fuel from nuclear reactors, and it's roughly one million times more radioactive than fresh uranium fuel. High-level waste is extremely carcinogenic, even lethal, and must be handled by remote control or under heavy shielding.

Spent fuel can also provide the basis for good ol' explosive nuclear bombs and dirty bombs (which spew radiation without that familiar mushroom cloud). So to prevent nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism, and a cancer epidemic, spent fuel must be contained virtually forever.

The goal at Yucca is to safely store 70,000 tons of radwaste for 1 million years. Over those 10,000 centuries, the radioactive isotopes will gradually cool and be converted into stable, non-radioactive isotopes. (Isotopes are versions of an element with a different number of neutrons. Different isotopes decay at different rates; with many elements, some isotopes are stable, others will decay and release radiation.)

For the repository at Yucca, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) would love to follow GambleVille's marketing mantra ("What radiates near Vegas stays near Vegas"). But the giant repository is unlikely to open for at least another 10 years, and in the meantime, spent fuel will continue stacking up at reactors across the country, making a splendid target for terrorists eager to release a deadly cloud of radiation or even trigger a nuclear meltdown.

As electric generating plants spew out millions of tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, interest in nuclear energy is rising. But new plans to reprocess nuclear fuel have raised old fears. Photo ©David Tenenbaum

Reprocessing redux?
The slipping schedule at Yucca has refocused attention on nuclear fuel reprocessing. When uranium fuel is first used in a reactor, it releases only about 1 percent of its nuclear energy (the fuel must then be replaced because a buildup of uranium breakdown products interferes with the chain reaction).

Unfortunately, many of these "fission products," such as cesium 137 and strontium 90, are remarkably radioactive. Still, about 99 percent of the nuclear energy remains in the spent fuel, mainly in the uranium 235 and plutonium 239. During reprocessing, these isotopes are separated out and blended into new fuel rods that go into another reactor. The fission products, however, become high-level radwaste.

Recycling uranium makes more sense than one-time use to many experts, including radiochemist Peter Burns of Notre Dame University. "Why are we calling this stuff waste? Why do we have a policy of sending this stuff to a nuclear waste repository?"

Reframing reprocessing: Miracle of recycling, or nightmare of proliferation?
Long before Americans were setting their bottles and cans on the curb for recycling, nuclear folks were thinking about recycling nuclear fuel. Recycling, AKA "reprocessing," can

Reduce the radioactivity and/or mass of spent fuel;

Produce more energy from each ton of uranium mined; and

"Close the fuel cycle" by reducing environmental impacts during fuel production and disposal.

Protestors from Greenpeace demonstrate in a blizzard at the gates of the new Japanese reprocessing plant, in 2004. Photo by J. Sutton-Hibbert, Greenpeace

At least, that's the theory. The reality of reprocessing is more contested than the seventh game of a Yankee-Red Sox World Series, and the process is a bit more complicated than melting aluminum cans into new cans for Cherry Toothrot TM. Yet while reprocessing is controversial in the United States, it's common in France, the United Kingdom, Russia and now Japan.

Here's our quickie reprocessing primer: Robots chop up the hot, highly radioactive fuel rods, dissolve the chunks in acid, and separate the plutonium and uranium from the fission products (which block chain reactions). The uranium and plutonium are then blended into new fuel.

Road transport of spent fuel in Japan. Photo: World Nuclear Transport Institute

Rejuvenating reprocessing
Thirty years after the United States rejected reprocessing of civilian nuclear waste, the DOE is reinvestigating reprocessing through the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, initiated in 2006. GNEP offered this deal to other nations: If you want to use nuclear electricity, the United States will supply the fuel -- if you promise to send your waste back to trusty Uncle Sam for reprocessing. Twenty-one nations have signed on to that program, which also intends to design smaller, safer reactors for developing countries.

Critics charged that GNEP's emphasis on reprocessing marked a dangerous and expensive policy about-face. GNEP "undermines U.S. nonproliferation policy, would cost taxpayers $100 billion or more, and ... [would] not solve the nuclear waste problem," wrote the Union of Concerned Scientists and 39 other groups last fall.

Also last fall, a National Research Council report recommended rejecting GNEP's reprocessing research regime, although it did favor more restricted research on recycling. (The original GNEP proposal had included generous funding to build GNEP's infrastructure, but Congress scotched that part.)

Massive tanks of liquid nuclear waste remain at the Hanford Site in Washington State after decades of reprocessing to extract plutonium for nuclear weapons from reactor fuel. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and others are working to remediate this waste, but for chemical and radiological reasons, it's tough slogging. Although the photo shows the inside of a double-walled tank, some early tanks have only one wall and pose little barrier to the spread of radiation. Hanford is on the banks of the Columbia River. Photo: PNL

Reenergizing reprocessing
Gregory Choppin, a professor of chemistry at Florida State University who has a long acquaintance with radiation chemistry says efficiency is a key argument for reprocessing, which extracts more energy from the uranium fuel, and therefore reduces the need to mine uranium. "If we go into reprocessing to recover the 99.5 percent of unburned uranium, and recycle it, we would not have to do any more uranium mining for 400 years," says Choppin. "That would be a tremendous advantage because uranium mining is very dangerous," especially in terms of lung disease, including cancer.

The coming nuclear boom has skyrocketed the price of uranium, but the Navajo Nation is still reeling from the last uranium boom, says Doug Brugge, associate professor of public health at Tufts University. Brugge says the "federal government has given compensation to over 6,000 uranium miners, millers and other workers" who suffered lung disease. "The government obviously has pretty stringent standards for compensation, so that's probably a low estimate, but ... that's a lot of people who died, or were made ill enough to qualify." In 2005, the Navajo Nation banned uranium mining, Brugge adds. "Their experience with uranium was so devastating that it overwhelms any financial incentives."

But could reprocessing also reduce the burden of finding safe storage for spent fuel? Yes, says Choppin. "You take out the plutonium, uranium, and probably some neptunium, which decays into plutonium, and keep them aside for further burning... so you not only destroy the plutonium and uranium 235, but you also get a lot of energy out."

However, the extent of reduction is open to debate. According to Michael Corradini, a professor of engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, "You don't reduce the radioactivity that goes into the ground, you do reduce the volume, so ... you still have to dispose of the radioactive waste that was caused by the fission. That solid, compact material still has to be buried."

Drilling at the McArthur River uranium mine in Canada. Uranium can decay into the gas radon, which causes lung cancer in uranium miners. Photo: Cameco

Dig this crazy process?
Reprocessing would be a mixed benefit, says John Ahearn, a former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and director emeritus of Sigma Xi, the scientific research society. "It's not a permanent solution, does not reduce the heat load at all, because it does not get rid of the real heat-generating material [the fast-decaying fission products]. It does reduce the volume and mass, because you have pulled out the uranium, which is a large contribution, and the plutonium, which is one of the problems."

Ahearn adds that the viability of reprocessing depends "on whether you can separate all the actinides [the heavy elements, including uranium and plutonium], and can re-burn them. These are all technology issues that not been resolved."

Ahearn says reprocessing could reduce the needed volume of the repository by 30 percent, which "would go a long way toward resolving the issue of whether there is enough space in Yucca Mountain." Still, he says the technical questions about reprocessing would need 10 to 20 years of further study, so even if reprocessing proves helpful, it will not help in the short term.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory staff collect groundwater samples, looking for radiation leaks from Hanford's giant "tank farm" holding reprocessing waste from the nuclear-bomb biz. Photo: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Reprehensible reprocessing?
Some observers take a much dimmer view of reprocessing, just as they did when the issue last surfaced 30 years ago. Reprocessing is "an incredibly complicated process, and it creates a liquid high-level waste stream," says Brice Smith, an assistant professor of physics at the State University of New York at Cortland.

Liquids are inherently tougher to contain than solids, and he says these wastes would need to be cast into glass or ceramic logs before going to underground storage. That process "has proven to be a significant challenge" at federal nuclear sites in Washington State, Idaho and South Carolina, he adds. "This liquid reprocessing waste would be very similar in a lot of respects to what we had left over from nuclear weapons, and it's very expensive" to handle.

Hanford has 177 radioactive waste storage tanks, built from 1943 to 1985, with a capacity ranging up to 1.1 million gallons. These are double-shell tanks, a safety innovation introduced in 1968. Photo: PNL

Reprocessing of military waste does have a nasty environmental history: Huge tanks of radwaste at federal nuclear sites have awaited safe disposal for as much as half a century. According to Robert Alvarez, a nuclear policy specialist at the Institute of Policy Studies, less than 1 percent of defense reprocessing wastes have been stabilized, despite the spending of billions of dollars on the effort in Washington State and South Carolina. The rest remains in tanks with varying degrees of integrity.

Rejecting reprocessing
Alvarez, who was a senior policy advisor in the DOE from 1993 to 1999, says GNEP is unlikely to survive scrutiny. "All this was flying around at the level of magical thinking, because no-one has taken a hard look" at the implications. For example, GNEP proposed to remove the fission products strontium and cesium from the spent fuel, Alvarez says. "No one has done this before, the amount of radioactivity is breathtaking; it's billions of curies. This is fantastically hot." (One curie of radioactive material emits the same radiation as one gram of radium 226: 37 billion radioactive disintegrations per second.)

This waste would need to be stored above ground for 100 years, before being diluted and placed in underground storage.

Even if, as GNEP plans, only 1 percent of elements heavier than uranium (including plutonium, americium and curium) end up in the waste, Alvarez sees danger. "That turns out to be many times more curies than was generated by the nuclear arms race."

Overall, GNEP seems rather helter-skelter, Alvarez charges. "These guys did not have any kind of plan, no estimate of the waste volume, concentration, how to manage it, dispose of it, and how much it is all going to cost."

But reprocessing is a big lure for federal nuclear labs and some in Congress, Alvarez says. "Politicians keep drinking the Kool Aid of recycling ...without understanding that this is the same thing we had to deal with 30 years ago" when India got the bomb through reprocessing. Reprocessing "is not recycling. It is a gateway technology for the manufacture of nuclear weapons, and it generates a large amount of waste which will make the [waste] problem worse."

As Alvarez indicates, during reprocessing, plutonium is separated from spent fuel, and it can then become a primary fuel for nuclear weapons. The military reactors built during and after World War II were designed to make plutonium for fission (atomic) and fusion (hydrogen) bombs.

When civilian nuclear power arrived in the 1950s, reprocessing was suggested as a way to stretch the uranium supply. Then in 1974, India tested a nuclear bomb made from reprocessed research-reactor fuel, and Presidents Ford and Carter rejected reprocessing in the civilian nuclear realm.

Preventing proliferation
Although opponents warn that reprocessing does the dangerous plutonium separation for nuclear terrorists and states that want the bomb, observers are not unanimous about the dangers of reprocessing. GNEP, for example, has proposed to find a technical solution that would block proliferation during reprocessing. One option is to leave high-intensity isotopes in the newly made fuel, to make it literally "too hot to handle." "Reprocessing is more of a proliferation risk than direct disposal," concedes Ahearn, but he thinks it possible to safeguard a reprocessing plant against proliferation. "There are reprocessing plants in Europe that have operated for decades, Japan is about to open a huge new one. I don't know any case where the plutonium from any of those plants has been stolen."

Choppin says enhanced international cooperation could address proliferation concerns. "The IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] already does a lot of international inspection of nuclear energy processes. If the IAEA is allowed to supervise, monitor the reprocessing, they could keep track of proliferation."

A train used for transporting radioactive materials in the United Kingdom. Transport containers must resist fires, accidents and terrorists. Photo: WNTI

Choppin says anti-proliferation efforts may benefit from a reorganization of the nuclear infrastructure. "I like a proposal by South Africa to build four or five reactors around a reprocessing plant" and reduce vulnerable shipments of nuclear material. "This has been suggested in Europe, to localize the reactors, so ... all the dangerous stuff is right there, it's easy to put the safeguards on and secure" the plutonium.

Basket of waste questions
For 30 years, as some nations reprocessed their spent nuclear fuel, the U.S. nuclear-waste strategy focused on a "geologic repository;" an underground wastebasket designed to prevent proliferation and environmental contamination for up to 1 million years.

Aerial view of Yucca Mountain, Nev., site of national repository. Photo: Nuclear Energy Institute

In 1987, Congress chose Nevada for a single national storehouse for spent civilian fuel, even though the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act had called for a second repository in the eastern United States. Yucca was supposed to start accepting spent fuel rods in 1998, but hasn't yet, and the schedule continues to slip. Indeed, by the time Yucca does open (the optimistic predictions say in 2018), the national spent-fuel stockpile will already exceed Yucca's design capacity of 70,000 tons.

In other words, a second waste site will be needed even before the first one opens its doors. But beyond civilian spent fuel, the overall radwaste problem also includes low-level waste and an ocean of high-level liquid waste left over from making 30,000+ nuclear bombs.

Nuclear waste -- spent fuel generated per year

Spent fuel is not just a problem in the United States. Europe is also struggling with the problem. Graph by Emmanuelle Bournay, UNEnvironment Program

Mountain of trouble
About $9-billion into the Yucca project, the storage site remains the focus of a labyrinth of technical, economic and political questions. Here's a small sample:

Technical: Can Yucca contain the radiation? How long before the cans holding the waste start to leak, and how soon will the radiation reach the environment?

Economic: Nuclear utilities (and their customers) have already paid the Department of Energy $27 billion to finance the Nevada dump, which was supposed to start taking waste in 1998. The utilities have begun winning lawsuits, claiming that they are paying to store waste that is now the fed's responsibility. These suits could eventually cost the feds double-digit billions (see #1 in the bibliography).

Political: Plenty of Silver Staters resent having a dump dumped on what was a weak, under-populated state, in a location already despoiled by nuclear explosions at the Nevada test site, site of Yucca Mountain. One vocal local, Harry Reid, happens to be Senate Majority Leader.

Can the canisters contain?
A lot of thought and expense has gone into designing the canisters that will hold waste at Yucca, but "eventually they will breach," says radiochemist Burns of Notre Dame. "The canisters are certain to fail, it's only a matter of how long. In 100 years? No. Maybe in 1,000. It's pretty much certain at 10,000 or 100,000 years." An earthquake, volcanic activity or a human intrusion could throw the release schedule out the window, he adds.

Yucca was chosen because it's remote and dry, but studies have found that it has an oxidizing environment, Burns says. "The big problem is that as soon as the canisters breach, the fuel starts to oxidize and release radioactivity in the groundwater. The bottom line is that no geologic environment is so sufficiently stable, and no canister design so robust, that you would expect it to last forever."

Yucca Mountain, where a radwaste repository is under construction, is inside the National Test Site, where about 1,000 atomic bombs were tested between 1951 and 1992. Graphic: Nuclear Energy Institute

These thoughts lead Burns to favor matching waste and repository for maximum stability. "Imagine we adopt reprocessing, and create two or three types of waste forms [such as glass or zeolite] to handle waste that can't be recycled," then build several geological repositories with chemical conditions suited to each type of waste. "We would get the best waste form for the environment," Burns says. "Yucca would be great for borosilicate [glass], but not for spent fuel. I imagine deep granite, an anoxic, reducing environment, would be great. The nuclear fuel would be an order of magnitude more stable, less soluble."

That approach might work in the long run, but waste continues to pile up in the short run. Each civilian nuclear power reactor in the United States has a giant swimming pool full of hot fuel rods -- and many reactor operators have already exceeded their original design capacity. These pools could be an irresistible draw to terrorists, who might be able to start a radiation-spewing fire by draining the pool or shutting off the cooling-water pump.

The interim storage pool at the French reprocessing plant, which opened in 1990. Photo: Areva

Waste not, want not?
This year, as the Department of Energy prepares to finally apply for a license for its Yucca dump, fuel that can't fit the overloaded swimming pools at nuclear reactors is being moved to "dry casks," air-cooled steel containers that require monitoring and protection against wackos, but need neither the water nor the pumps used in cooling ponds.

Dry casks are "now clearly the method of choice," says Ahearn, the former nuclear regulator. "To build another swimming pool for a reactor is a whole messy licensing process, and companies have realized that dry casks are safe and economical; that's the trend."

Some skeptics who question whether Yucca Mountain can or should be opened say that consolidating the casks would make them easier to guard. A 50- to 100-year cooling-off period would allow the development of better waste-disposal technology.

Nuclear Energy Institute

While we've highlighted a thorny dispute about the wisdom of reprocessing, our experts were unanimous on this: With or without reprocessing, geologic storage will always be needed for high-level radioactive waste that must be isolated indefinitely from the environment and sociopaths.

Rather than fading away, the need for radwaste storage grows more acute. In the United States, an estimated 55,000 tons of civilian spent fuel await entombment, and 103 operating reactors are producing another 2,000 tons of spent fuel each year.

Reactor construction peaked during the 1970s, but a resurgence is now under way around the world -- including the United States. Graph by Philippe Rekacewicz, UNEP/GRID-Arenda, UNEnvironment Program

While the United States awaits applications for more new reactors, the international picture shows rapid growth, according to Germany's Der Spiegel: "Currently there are 435 atomic reactors generating electricity in 31 countries across the globe. They fill 6.5 percent of the world's total energy demand and use close to 70,000 tons of enriched uranium per year [about one Yucca Mountain worth of waste per year, in other words] ... At present, 29 nuclear power plants are under construction and there are concrete plans to build another 64. Another 158 are under consideration" (see #2 in the bibliography).

Reprocessing -- no silver bullet
Although reprocessing remains highly controversial, our experts agreed that at some point, radioactive material that can supply no further energy will need burial to deter proliferation and environmental contamination. "Even if you do reprocessing, you still end up with some waste," says Ahearn.

In France, and in the other countries that are reprocessing, "They cycle back the long-lived material, but still have to bury something," says nuclear engineer Michael Corradini. "The French are reprocessing, taking 99 percent of the mass and putting it back into plants to reuse the uranium, burn down the plutonium, but they are still building up more waste -- you can change the nature of it, but you can't get rid of it."

Recycling builds up a waste stream containing short-lived (and intensely radioactive) isotopes like strontium 90 and cesium 137, while making electricity from the long-lived isotopes of plutonium and other transuranics, Corradini adds. "My message is that you always have to bury something... There is no magic bullet. Eventually you will have a radioactive substance which has various times in which it decays, and you will have to put it in geological isolation."

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5351

The Beauty of Completing the Nuclear Fuel Cycle The U.S. pioneered the full nuclear fuel cycle, but gave it up in the 1970s, following a Ford Administration policy written under the direction of Dick Cheney. Marjorie Mazel Hecht reports.1 Related Pages
	The full nuclear fuel cycle shows that nuclear is a renewable energy source, because the spent fuel can be reprocessed to recover unburned uranium and plutonium that can be fabricated into new reactor fuel. At present, the U.S. nuclear is “once through,” going from spent fuel to interim storage and then longer-term storage. It would take 2 million grams of oil or 3 million grams of coal to equal the power contained in 1 gram of uranium fuel.2 Unlike oil and coal, nuclear fuel is recyclable and, in a breeder reactor, can actually produce more fuel than is used up! For these reasons, nuclear energy is by far the best means now available to power a modern industrial economy. Nuclear power is a gift to humanity, and only the propaganda of Malthusian extremists, dedicated to stopping human progress and reducing the world’s population, has created public fear and skepticism. The best way to overcome irrational fear is through knowledge. To this end, reviewed here is the process by which natural uranium ore is turned into fuel for a nuclear reactor, how it is used, and how it can be recycled, such that the reader will come to understand that there is really no such thing as nuclear “waste.” The Nuclear Fuel Cycle DOE An overhead view of rows of centrifuge units at a U.S. enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio. To understand the “renewability” of nuclear fission fuel, we have to look at the complete fuel cycle. At the beginning of the nuclear age, it was assumed that nations would complete the fuel cycle—including the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel from reactors, to get as near to 100% use of the uranium fuel as possible. Here we very briefly review the seven steps of this cycle. Keep in mind that the brevity of description leaves out details of the complex chemical processes, which were initiated during the Manhattan Project and are still being improved on. 1. First, natural uranium is mined. There are enough sources of uranium worldwide for today’s immediate needs, but once we begin an ambitious nuclear development program (to build 6,000 nuclear reactors in order to provide enough electricity to bring the entire world population up to a decent living standard), we would have to accelerate the development of fast breeder nuclear reactors, which produce more fuel than they consume in operation. 2. Next, the uranium is processed and milled into uranium oxide (U3O8), called yellowcake, which is the raw material for fission fuel. Yellowcake became infamous in the political fabrication that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was trying to import yellowcake from Niger, in order to use it for bomb-making. It is basically natural uranium ore, which is crushed and processed by leaching (with acid or carbonate) to dissolve the uranium, which can then be extracted and concentrated to 75% uranium, in combination with ammonium or sodium-magnesium. 3. The concentrated uranium is then converted into uranium hexafluoride (UF6), which is heated into a gas form suitable for enrichment. Uranium Enrichment 4. Natural uranium has one primary isotope, U-238, which is not fissionable, and a much smaller amount of U-235, which fissions. Because most uranium (99.276%) is U-238, the uranium fuel must go through a process of enrichment, to increase the ratio of fissionable U-235 to the non-fissionable U-238 from about 0.7% to 3 to 4%. (Weapons uranium is enriched to about 93% U-235.) The technology of enrichment was developed during the World War II Manhattan Project, when the object was to create highly enriched uranium (HEU) to be used in the atomic bomb. Civilian power reactors use mostly low-enriched uranium (LEU). (Canada has developed a type of reactor, the CANDU, which uses unenriched, natural uranium in combination with a heavy water moderator to produce fission.) Frank Hoffman/DOE The huge Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., the first such facility in the world. The U-shaped building, constructed during the Manhattaan Project, began operation in 1945. Later, the facility was expanded to produce enriched uranium for plants around the world. The gaseous diffusion method of enrichment, which is still used by the United States, was developed under the Manhattan Project. Uranium hexafluoride gas is pumped through a vast series of porous membranes—thousands of miles of them. The molecules of the lighter isotope (U-235) pass through the membrane walls slightly faster than do the heavier isotope (U-238). When extracted, the gas has an increased content of U-235, which is fed into the next membrane-sieve, and the process is repeated until the desired enrichment is reached. Because the molecular speeds of the two uranium isotopes differ by only about 0.4%, each diffusion operation must be repeated 1,200 times. The Manhattan Project devised this method of gaseous diffusion with incredible speed and secrecy. It was not finished in time to produce all the uranium for the uranium bomb dropped on Japan, but it produced most of the enriched uranium for the civilian and military programs in subsequent years. Although a successful method, it required a tremendous amount of energy and a huge physical structure to house the “cascades” of separate membranes. Four power plants were built in Oak Ridge, Tenn., to power the process, producing as much electric power as the consumption of the entire Soviet Union in 1939! Almost all the power consumed in the diffusion process is used to circulate and compress the uranium gas. Technological pessimists take note: At the time the gaseous diffusion plant was being built, scientists had not yet figured out how to make a membrane to be used in the process—but they did it in time to make it work! The centrifuge system, used in Europe and Japan, is 10 times as energy efficient. The strong centrifugal field of a rotating cylinder sends the heavier isotope in uranium hexafluoride to the outside of the cylinder, where it can be drawn off, while the U-235 diffuses to the inside of the cylinder. Because of the limitations of size of the centrifuge, many thousands of identical centrifuges, connected in a series called a cascade, are necessary to produce the required amounts of enriched uranium. A centrifuge plant requires only about 4% of the power needed for a gaseous diffusion plant, and less water is needed for cooling. Other methods of enrichment are possible—electromagnetic separation, laser isotope separation, and biological methods. Fabrication Into Fuel Rods U.S. AEC A cylinder of uranium hexaflouride enriched in U-235 is readied for shipment to a conversion facility, where it will be converted to uranium dioxide for use in fuel rods. The cylinder weighs 2.5 tons. Westinghouse Photo A partially completed nuclear fuel assembly. The long tubes guide the control rods in the reactor, which regulated its operation. The grids that hold the guide sheaths also align the fuel rods containing uranium pettets. When the fuel rods are inserted through the grids, parallel to the guide sheath, the fuel assembly will be completed. 5. Once the enriched uranium is separated from the depleted uranium, it is converted from UF6 into uranium dioxide and fabricated into uniform pellets. The pellets are loaded into long tubes made out of a zirconium alloy, which captures very few neutrons. This cladding prevents the release of fission products and also transfers the heat produced by the nuclear fission process in the fuel. The fuel is then transported to the reactor site. Different types of reactors require different designs of fuel rods and fuel bundles. In a light water reactor, the fuel rods are inserted into the reactor to produce fission, which creates steam, which turns a turbine that creates electricity. The fuel for the next-generation high-temperature gas-cooled reactors is different: The enriched uranium is formed into tiny “pebbles” which are coated with graphite and special ceramics that serve as individual “containment buildings” for the fuel pebbles. 6. Fuel rods are used for about four and a half years before replacement, and usually a reactor replaces about a third of its fuel at one time. The fuel is considered spent when the concentration of fissile uranium-235 becomes less than 1%. When removed from the reactor, the spent fuel is put into cooling pools, which shield it as its short-lived nuclides decay. Within a year, the total radioactivity level is only about 12% of what it was when the fuel rod came out of the reactor. At present, the United States does not reprocess spent fuel, and so the spent fuel rods sit in cooling pools at the reactor. After the spent fuel has cooled, it is stored in dry casks, waiting—for “burial” or reprocessing. But the spent fuel is not “waste”! It contains between 90 and 95% of usable uranium, that can be separated out and recycled into new fuel, and it also contains a smaller amount—about 1%—of plutonium, a fuel for breeder reactors. Reprocessing Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation In this 1964 photo, laboratory technicians work in glove-boxes to remotely fabricate plutonium fuel elements. 7. Now for the remarkable renewability of nuclear fuel. The spent fuel from a single 1,000-megawatt nuclear plant, operated over 40 years, is equal to the energy in 130 million barrels of oil, or 37 million tons of coal. Why bury it? Extract it and process it into new fuel. Short-sighted policymakers (discussed below) decided in the 1970s, for no good reasons, that it was preferable to prevent the full use of this potential by burying the spent fuel in a once-through cycle. The reprocessing method that was successfully used in the United States at the Savannah River facility in South Carolina for military purposes, is just as efficient for civilian spent fuel. Spent fuel rods are processed to remove the highly radioactive fission products, and separate out (partition) the fissionable U-235 and plutonium. This plutonium could be directly used as fuel for breeder reactors, which was the intention of the completed fuel cycle. It can also be used to make mixed-oxide fuel, or MOX, which some of today’s reactors are being converted to burn as fuel. (Thirty-five reactors in Europe now use MOX fuel.) The reprocessing facilities at Savannah River were called “canyons” because they were tall, narrow buildings. The spent nuclear fuel was handled remotely by technicians who were behind protective walls. This was large-scale industrial processing, which was entirely successful, safe, and safeguarded. Once the uranium was separated out, it was sent to another building at Savannah River to be fabricated for weapons use. The remaining amount of highly radioactive fission products—a tiny fraction of the spent fuel—was set aside for vitrification and storage. Today, the technologies exist, or could be developed, to extract valuable medical and other isotopes from this 3% of high-level waste. Virtually all of the spent fuel could be made usable. U.S. civilian spent fuel could be reprocessed in a similar fashion using the Savannah River model—or by new technologies still to be developed.3 Right now, Britain, France, Russia, and India reprocess civilian spent fuel, using the Purex method (which stands for Plutonium Uranium Extraction), and Japan has a commercial reprocessing plant now in a testing start-up phase. Other nuclear nations send their spent fuel to Britain or France for reprocessing, or they store it. China reprocesses military spent fuel. Who Opposes Reprocessing? E.I. DuPont DeNemours &Co. A 1972 photo of high-level waste storage tanks in construction at DOE’s Savannah River Plant in South Carolina. The tanks are built of carbon steel, surrounded by concrete encasements 2 to 3 feet thick, set about 40 feet in the ground and then covered with dirt. Shown are the steel tanks before concrete encasement. Each tank has a capacity of from 750,000 to 1,300,000 gallons. Reprocessing makes the antipopulation faction very nervous, because it implies that nuclear power will continue to develop as a source of electricity, and with a cheap and clean source of power, there are no limits to growth. Malthusians and other alarmists rant about the “dangers of proliferation,” but if you poke them, what they are really concerned about is the potential for nuclear energy to expand, and population and industrial development to grow. The overt arguments against reprocessing are mostly scare tactics: Permitting U.S. reprocessing will make it easier, they say, for “bad guys” to build bombs—or dirty bombs. This is the gist of the objection, although it may be posed at length in more academic (and tedious) language. But this argument is one based on fear—fear that an advanced technology can never be managed properly, and fear that we will never have a world where there aren’t “bad guys” who want to bomb us. It is the opposite of the Atoms for Peace philosophy. In fact, if one is truly worried about diversion of plutonium, why not burn it to produce electricity, instead of letting it accumulate in storage? And as Savannah River manager William P. Bebbington, a veteran of the Manhattan Project, wrote in a landmark 1976 article on reprocessing, “Perhaps our best hope is that someday plutonium will be more valuable for power-reactor fuel than for weapons, and that the nations will then beat their bombs into fuel rods.”4 A second objection is that reprocessing is not “economical”; it is cheaper to have a “once through cycle” and discard the spent fuel. But the cost/benefit basis on which such economics are calculated is a sham. What is the cost of not reprocessing—in terms of lives lost and society not advancing? And what about the cost of the storage of spent fuel—not to mention the still unused U.S. storage facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, which has become a costly political and emotional football. The “proliferation” argument was key in 1976 in stopping U.S. reprocessing. Fear was fed by the idea that reprocessing would make more plutonium available, which could be diverted by “rogue” nations or groups to make clandestine nuclear weapons. President Ford, the incumbent, carried out a secret study, and issued a nuclear policy statement on Oct. 28, 1976, just five days before the election, which advocated an end to reprocessing. Jimmy Carter, who won that election, then carried out the policy to stop U.S. reprocessing; and the next President, Ronald Reagan, sealed the lid on the fuel-cycle coffin with the idea of “privatizing” both reprocessing and breeder reactors. The full story of how reprocessing was stopped still has to be told. But the ending of the story is clear: The United States shot itself in the foot—twice: 1) The United States stopped an important technology, which this country had pioneered, and 2) the U.S. anti-reprocessing policy did absolutely nothing in the rest of the world to stop other countries from developing the full nuclear fuel cycle, or desiring to.5 Interestingly, the Ford Administration’s policy in 1976, which advocated killing U.S. reprocessing for the same fallacious reasons that President Carter later elaborated, was written under the direction of Ford’s chief of staff—Dick Cheney. And one of the key reports supporting Carter’s ban on reprocessing was written by the mentor of the leading neo-cons in the Bush Administration, Albert Wohlstetter, then a consultant to the Department of Defense. Once the political decision is taken to begin an ambitious nuclear construction program, reprocessing—both Purex and new technologies—will follow. For Further Reading Scott W. Heaberlin, A Case for Nuclear-Generated Electricity ... or why I think nuclear power is cool and why it is important that you think so too (Columbus, Oh.: Battelle Press, 2004). Alan Waltar, Radiation and Modern Life (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2004). See also: http://www.world-nuclear.org/education/education.htm on the fuel cycle. 1. Reprinted from 21st Century Science & Technology, Winter 2005-06. See www.21stcenturysciencetech.com. 2. The energy density of nuclear can be seen by comparing fission fuel to other sources. In terms of volume of fuel necessary to do the same amount of work, a tiny pellet (1.86 grams) of uranium fuel equals 1,260 gallons of oil, or 6.15 tons of coal, or 23.5 tons of dry wood. This means that nuclear is 2.2 million times more energy dense than oil, and 3 million times more energy dense than coal. Thermonuclear fusion will be even orders of magnitude more energy dense. These calculations were based on the work of Dr. Robert J. Moon in 1985. 3. The U.S. Congress in the 2005 Energy Act included $50 million for research on new reprocessing methods. 4. “The Reprocessing of Nuclear Fuels” by William P. Bebbington, Scientific American, December 1976, pp. 30-41. 5. Commenting on President Carter’s 1977 policy to shut down reprocessing and the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, Bernard Goldschmidt, a preeminent French nuclear scientist, who had studied with Marie Curie, wrote: “By this extraordinary and unique act of self-mutiliation, an already declining American industry was to become paralyzed in two key sectors of future development, fuel reprocessing and breeder reactors, precisely the sectors in which the United States was already between 5 and 10 years behind the Soviet Union and Western Europe, in particular, France....”

"The Government has concluded," it says, "that any nuclear power stations that might be built in the UK should proceed on the basis that spent fuel will not be reprocessed." This is the clearest statement so far of ministers' intention to abandon the decades-old policy of reprocessing uranium burnt in reactors.

All the fuel from Britain's first and second generation nuclear stations has been chemically separated into uranium, plutonium and radioactive waste at Sellafield in Cumbria. Only spent fuel from one station - the pressurised water reactor at Sizewell in Suffolk (pictured) - has not been reprocessed.

But the new government energy paper says that reprocessing "raises particular concerns about the creation of separated plutonium". It also points out that the private sector "has made no proposals to reprocess spent fuel from many new nuclear power stations."

Reprocessing at Sellafield has been dogged with problems, with the main plant shut down since April 2005 following a leak of 83,000 litres of highly radioactive nitric acid. A plan to restart the plant earlier in 2007 had to be postponed when problems were discovered with downstream evaporators.

The government's decision to end reprocessing will not be welcomed at Sellafield, though neither the plant's operator, the British Nuclear Group, nor its owner, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, wanted to comment.

The abandonment of reprocessing would represent a small victory for the anti-nuclear lobby which has long targeted Sellafield's operations as polluting and unnecessary. But Greenpeace points out that it will leave the government with new problems to solve - like where to store and how to dispose of the spent fuel. That looks like more bad news to be buried in the future.

Rob Edwards, New Scientist consultant

Plutonium Program

Estimates vary of both the amount of plutonium in North Korea's possession and number of nuclear weapons that could be manufactured from the material. Official estimates of the amount of reproccessed plutonium reportedly range from 7 to 24 kilograms, and the amount of plutonium that North Korea would need for a single bomb range from 4 to 8 kilograms. Thus, by one calculation North Korea might have as many as six nuclear weapons, if it could use 24 kilograms to make 4 kilogram bombs. Or it might barely fall short of being able to make a single bomb, if it had only 7 kilograms when it needed 8 kilograms of plutonium.

South Korean, Japanese, and Russian intelligence estimates of the amount of plutonium separated, for example, are reported to be higher -- 7 to 22 kilograms, 16 to 24 kilograms, and 20 kilograms, respectively -- than the reported US estimate of about 12 kilograms. At least two of the estimates are said to be based on the assumption that North Korea removed fuel rods from the 5-MW(e) reactor and subsequently reprocessed the fuel during slowdowns in the reactor's operations in 1990 and 1991.

In principle the North Korea 5-MW(e) reactor would produce 0.9 gram of Plutonium per thermal megawatt every day of operations. When the yearly operations rate [capacity factor] is presumed to be 85 percent, the actual amount produced each year would be between 5.5 and 8.5 kilograms [given the range of estimates of between 20 and 30 megawatts thermal output. A lower, and possibly more realistic, estimate based on a capacity factor of 60 percent would suggest an annual production rate of between 4 and 6 kilograms.

In 1989, the reactor was shut down for a period variously estimated at between 70 and 100 days, and this would have provided enough time for North Korea to unload some or all of the fuel for reprocessing. By this time, the total production could have been somewhere between 8 and 15 kilograms of plutonium. North Korea claims that it only removed a few damaged fuel rods, which were reprocessed in the Radiochemical Laboratory in 1990. According to the North, these contained about 0.13 kilograms of plutonium, of which only a 0.09 kilograms were extracted.

When the reactor was shut down for refueling in April 1994, it was variously estimated that the unloaded spent fuel contained 17 to 33 kilograms of weapon-grade plutonium. The 8,000 spent fuel rods at the Yongbyon facility are in special canisters, under the watchful eye of the International Atomic Energy Agency 24 hours a day. Those eight thousand spent fuel rods contain enough plutonium for the North Koreans to build up to perhaps as many as six additional nuclear weapons. Absent international safeguards, North Korea could begin reprocessing the spent fuelinto plutonium for atomic bombs in six to eight months, according to some estimates.

The variations in the estimates about the number of weapons that could be produced from the material depend on a variety of factors, including assumptions about North Korea's reprocessing capabilities -- advanced technology yields more material -- and the amount of plutonium it takes to make a nuclear weapon. Until January 1994, the Department of Energy (DOE) estimated that 8 kilograms would be needed to make a small nuclear weapon. In January 1994, however, DOE reduced the estimate of the amount of plutonium needed to 4 kilograms.

On 22 April 1997, US Defense Department spokesman Kenneth Bacon officially stated, "When the US-North Korea nuclear agreement was signed in Geneva in 1994, the US intelligence authorities already believed North Korea had produced plutonium enough for at least one nuclear weapon." This was the first time the United States confirmed North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons.

According to a late 2002 CIA analysis, "Restarting the 5 megawatt reactor would generate about 6 kilograms [of plutonium] per year. ... The 50 megawatt-electric reactor at Yongbyon and the 200 megawatt-electric reactor at Taechon would generate about 275 kilograms per year, although it would take several years to complete construction of these reactors." If about 5 kilograms of plutonium was required for one bomb, the North Korean bomb-production rate would thus be about 55 weapons per year after the reactors are completed. ["North Korea Can Build Nukes Right Now," By Bill Gertz, The Washington Times, November 22, 2002 Pg. 1].

A story in the New York Times on July 20, 2003 reported that US intelligence officials believe that North Korea may have a second facility that could produce weapons-grade plutonium. The second facility is believed to be buried underground at an unknown location. The story, "North Korea Hides New Nuclear Site, Evidence Suggests" by David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker New York Times reported that sensors on North Korea's borders have begun to detect elevated levels of krypton-85, a gas emitted as spent fuel is converted into plutonium. The report says the issue that most concerns American and Asian officials, though, is analysis showing that the gas is not coming from North Korea's main nuclear plant, Yongbyon. Instead, the experts believe the gas may be coming from another hidden facility, buried deep in the mountains. North Korea is believed to have 11-15,000 underground military-industrial facilities.

The September 1, 2003 edition of Jane's Intelligence Review reports that the director of the the ROK's National Intelligence Service stated to the National Assembly in early July 2003 that North Korea had conducted 70 high-explosive tests at Yondok, 40km northwest of Yongbyon. Such high explosives could be used in plutonium device by compressing the plutonium core to create a nuclear explosion.

On 02 October 2003 North Korea said it had reprocessed eight thousand nuclear fuel rods and plutonium extracted from them could be used to strengthen its "nuclear deterrent force." A statement from the North Korean foreign ministry carried by the official Korean Central News Agency said that North Korea is manufacturing nuclear bombs with the material siphoned off from reprocessing eight thousand spent nuclear fuel rods. North Korea's latest claim came days after it warned it was taking "practical measures" to increase its nuclear deterrent against attacks by the United States. At the same time, a senior North Korean official reportedly said that his government will not export its nuclear capability. Vice Foreign Minister Choe Su Hon, said that Pyongyang does not intend to transfer its nuclear know-how to other countries.

During a visit to Yongbyon on 08 January 2004, North Korea showed an unofficial American delegation what it asserted was weapons-grade plutonium. The group spent about a day at Yongbyon, and was shown the empty cooling pond where the 8,000 fuel rods from the 5-megawatt nuclear reactor had been stored. During the visit, the reprocessing plant was operating.

In January 2004 DPRK Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Kim Gye Gwan indicated that the DPRK had decided in November 2002 to operate the 5MWe reactor and resume reprocessing of plutonium for peaceful nuclear activities. He stated, “It is the only way to keep the spent fuel rods safe.” He added, “At the same time, the hostile U.S. policy had been intensified. So, we changed our purpose and informed the U.S. that the plutonium that was to have been used for peaceful purposes would now be used for weapons. Originally, we had wanted to keep the reprocessed plutonium in a way we could store it safely. Then, we changed the purpose in order to strengthen our deterrent.” During the 08 January 2004 visit of the American delegation, the North Koreans stated that they had initially intended to run the fuel cycle for civilian purposes, which means they would have stored the plutonium product as plutonium dioxide. Because of the "hostile U.S. actions" they reprocessed the entire campaign to plutonium metal. [Hecker testimony]

During the 08 January 2004 visit of the American delegation, the North Koreans stated that they reprocessed all 8000 spent fuel rods in the Radiochemical Laboratory in one continuous campaign, starting in mid-January 2003 and finishing by the end of June 2003. They stated that their capacity in the Radiochemical Laboratory is 375 kg uranium per day (they said they worked four 6-hr shifts around the clock). They later added that the reprocessing capacity of the facility under normal operating conditions is 110 tonnes of spent uranium fuel per year. Therefore, they were able to finish the current campaign of 50 tonnes of spent fuel rods in less than six months. They reprocessed the entire campaign to plutonium metal. They stated that this processing was done in the Radiochemical Laboratory by installing some glove boxes that were not present during IAEA inspections. It took them three months to install the equipment and prepare it for the plutonium metal processing step. These comments indicated that they had glove boxes for plutonium metal production ready to go in late 2002. This also indicated that they had experience making plutonium metal before the IAEA inspections began in 1992. The American delegation was shown the “product” from what the North Koreans claimed to be their most recent reprocessing campaign -- a wooden box with a glass jar they said contained 150 grams of plutonium oxalate powder and a glass jar they said contained 200 grams of plutonium metal for the Americans to inspect. [Hecker testimony]

By BBC News Online's Ryan Dilley

British Nuclear Fuels claims to be the place "where science never sleeps", but its controversial nuclear reprocessing business could soon be abruptly put to bed forever.

The possible return of British mixed oxide (Mox) fuel rods from Japan, following a furore over the safety documentation accompanying them, may spell its doom.

BNFL's Thorp plant at Sellafield in Cumbria is one of only two reprocessing facilities in the world. Its work represents around a quarter of the company's business.

Thorp's closure could see 7,000 job losses

The activity directly supports some 7,000 jobs in a remote area heavily reliant on BNFL's presence.

The plant takes spent uranium fuel rods, removes impurities and recombines the uranium with plutonium, which is also produced during reprocessing, making Mox fuel to be used again in nuclear reactors.

Mox has long been portrayed as the saviour of the nuclear energy industry. By recycling uranium, it allays public qualms about waste storage and offers nations a buffer against price hikes in, once costly, uranium.

Out of reach

Throwing plutonium back into the mix is one way of putting the weapons-grade material to a non-military use, preventing its needless stockpiling in nations such as Germany and Japan.

Mox has also been put forward as a solution to it falling into the hands of pariah states with nuclear ambitions.

Its detractors have seen reprocessing as at best an expensive "utopian" dream.

One of its fiercest critics, St Andrews University international relations professor William Walker, says the whole system has been kept afloat by political will rather than economic sense.

The disputed Japanese Mox shipment may finally sink the boat.

"Reprocessing will come to a grinding halt pretty soon," says Professor Walker.

The six-gram pellets, each containing as much energy as a tonne of coal, inside Mox fuel rods are supposed to be measured manually.

False hope

The Japanese say that in a shipment last year, the records of these tests were falsified, and want BNFL to take the rods back, even if they aren't necessarily faulty.

The Swiss nuclear watchdog spotted "anomalies" in the records of another BNFL consignment which was loaded into a reactor without mishap.

Opinion in Japan is turning against Mox

The breaches of "quality assurance", compounded by a lukewarm safety report on Sellafield by the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, have seen Japan, Switzerland and Germany suspend Mox imports from the UK.

More than two-thirds of BNFL's £12bn reprocessing business comes from foreign customers, mostly Japan.

The public company even built a new £300m plant, now mothballed, on the promise of more work from its star Asian client.

Rethinking Mox

Professor Walker says the troubled fuel rods sitting at the Takahama nuclear plant, which Japan wants shipped back, have given all BNFL's customers a chance to rethink their approach to Mox.

"Japan's game plan is to put a few spanners in the works, make life difficult for BNFL and the British government to get a change of policy," says Professor Walker.

Reprocessing will come to a grinding halt pretty soon

Professor William Walker

Mox and nuclear reprocessing seem to have had their day as far as the newly liberalised foreign utility companies which make up the bulk of BNFL's customers are concerned, says Dr Gordon MacKerron of the Science Policy Research Unit.

"Japan is looking for an excuse not to take Mox because it's expensive. This may be part of an opportunistic desire to get out."

Dr MacKerron says that even if BNFL gets the spent fuel for "free", the total cost of fabricating Mox exceeds that of buying new uranium.

Locked away

Reprocessing also raises nuclear proliferation issues. The plutonium it creates, even once put into Mox, is more accessible for misuse than if left locked inside spent fuel.

Governments outside the reprocessing loop, and those on the route of ships taking Mox back from Sellafield, remain unconvinced by the scheme.

Ship comes in: BNFL's Mox programme may run aground

Despite tight international guidelines covering vessel safety, these ships will never be completely invulnerable to accidents, says Trevor Blakley, chief executive of the Royal Institute of Naval Architects.

"You can minimise the consequences of an unexpected event, but double bottoms and enhanced stability cannot stop your ship hitting something or something hitting you."

There is also the worry, perhaps remote, that those illegally seeking plutonium for weapons production may be tempted by Mox.

Even if terrorists or the Far East's increasingly brazen pirates give BNFL's armed ships a wide berth, environmentalists may find such a high-profile target too tempting.

Turning tide

The public mood is also turning against Mox. In Japan's Wakasa Bay, home to Takahama and 14 other nuclear plants, 2,000 locals have signed a petition querying the entire policy.

Professor Walker says Japan may now push to renegotiate its old contracts with BNFL, hoping Sellafield will agree to store rather than reprocess the country's nuclear waste.

Politically, this would be a big step for the UK authorities.

Taking irradiated material from abroad to be turned into Mox and then re-exported is one thing, keeping spent fuel in this country until a solution can be found for disposal is quite another.

Could Britain become a nuclear storage site?

As well as trying to convince the British public of the merits of waste storage and explaining away BNFL's long commitment to Mox, the closure of Thorp could stir up a storm with its disruption to Cumbria's economy.

A closed plant would also be left with a 50-tonne inventory of plutonium, the world's largest civilian stock.

Although BNFL's new broom, Norman Askew, says it won't "walk away" from its reprocessing investment, the Japanese saga may have made that a fait accompli.

If Kansai Electric Power, and its equivalents in Germany and Switzerland, turn away from Mox, Dr MacKerron doubts Thorp or the new BNFL plant will find new business.

Market forces

"The chances of finding a decent-sized market after all these safety scares seems slim."

He also says customers "would be crazy to volunteer for plutonium" if they hadn't already entered the reprocessing loop.

Turning BNFL into a storage business may prove the financial saving of the company, says Professor Walker.

The chances of [BNFL] finding a decent-sized market after all these safety scares seems slim

Dr Gordon MacKerron

"Storage is a more viable activity. It offers stable and predictable profits. I think the British public will stomach it if the terms and safety issues are addressed correctly."

In the long term, this solution may satisfy all parties, even the environmentalists who decry the transport of spent fuel and Mox across the globe.

The economic arguments for storage may even save government plans to partially sell-off BNFL, a move shelved since the Mox fiasco.

In the short-term, the public-owned company may well end up having to foot the shipping and storage bills for the Takahama Mox, despite the fact the original fuel wasn't even produced in the UK.

Institute for Energy and Environmental Research

February 2001

North Koreans Claim to Extract Fuel for Nuclear Weapons

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TOKYO, Thursday, May 12 - North Korea said Wednesday that it had harvested a nuclear reactor for weapons fuel, the country's latest effort to put pressure on the Bush administration and its allies.

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North Korea said Wednesday that it had taken spent fuel rods from a reactor at its Yongbyon nuclear complex.

Weapons From Spent Nuclear Fuel

What Are Koreans Up To? U.S. Agencies Can't Agree (May 12, 2005)

But intelligence and Pentagon officials said that as of late Wednesday they had seen no evidence to confirm or disprove the assertion. Outside experts expressed skepticism that North Korea's action, even if confirmed, would significantly increase its weapons stockpile.

In a statement, North Korea said it had removed 8,000 spent fuel rods from a reactor at its main nuclear complex at Yongbyon as one of several "necessary measures" to bolster its nuclear arsenal.

In the worst case, experts have said, by removing and reprocessing the fuel rods, North Korea could produce fuel-grade plutonium for one to three nuclear weapons. But their suspicions were aroused because by leaving the rods inside the reactor for another year, North Korea could have obtained a much better yield of weapons fuel.

"There is a lot of symbolism and taunting here," one senior administration official said.

North Korea expelled international inspectors in late 2002, and without them, it is impossible to independently verify its claims. Both outside analysts and administration officials note that North Korean leaders could be bluffing in an attempt to wrest concessions from the United States in long-stalled six-nation negotiations to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear program.

Or, they said, the North Koreans could have pulled the fuel from the reactor early because of technical problems, or because of fears that the United States would order a strike on the reactor, a step that President Bill Clinton considered in 1994, during a previous crisis.

The shutdown of the reactor about a month ago, and Wednesday's statement, appear to be part of a North Korean effort to convince the world that it is already a nuclear weapons state, capable of both producing weapons and supplying itself with weapons-grade plutonium. On Thursday, Vice Minister of Unification Rhee Bong-Jo of South Korea said the reactor was closed March 31.

North Korea declared for the first time on Feb. 10 that it possessed nuclear weapons. The five-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon, the country's tightly guarded nuclear complex, was probably shut in early April, intelligence analysts said, based on satellite photos. By late last month a debate broke out in the American intelligence agencies over whether the shutdown was prompted by a need to perform maintenance, or a move to pull the rods out. Last week, two officials, one American and one foreign, reported that a platform and large crates were seen near the reactor.

"They gave me the impression that the unloading had started," Selig S. Harrison, a North Korea specialist and the director of the Asia program at the Center for International Policy in Washington, said by telephone Wednesday of meetings he had with North Korean officials in Pyongyang, the capital, from April 5 to 9.

Rods can be safely removed from a reactor shortly after a shutdown, nuclear experts said. But then they need to be cooled. After that they need to go through a complex process called "reprocessing" to extract weapons-grade plutonium.

Over the next 18 months, North Korea could produce fuel for one to three bombs from the rods, according to Daniel A. Pinkston, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program of the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

Removing rods and storing them in water tanks in a building adjacent to the reactor takes about six weeks, Dr. Pinkston said by telephone from California. But it would take at least six months for the rods to cool sufficiently for safe reprocessing. Reprocessing 110 tons of rods from the reactor core would take another year, he estimated.

In an interview in Washington on Wednesday, Robert Alvarez, a former senior policy adviser to the Department of Energy who visited the reactor in North Korea 11 years ago, cautioned against racing to the conclusion that North Korea was capable of making the fuel into weapons.

North Koreans Claim to Extract Fuel for Nuclear Weapons

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Published: May 12, 2005

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"You have to think about the variables, not just the worst-case scenarios," he said. He called the site "very primitive" and said a problem with the rods might have forced North Korea to withdraw them from the reactor. "We saw some problems when we were there," he said, "and we don't know if they have been fixed." The rods would be likely to yield some bomb-grade material. The question is how much.

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Weapons From Spent Nuclear Fuel

What Are Koreans Up To? U.S. Agencies Can't Agree (May 12, 2005)

Recently, American officials have debated whether satellite photos indicate that North Korea is preparing for a first nuclear test. The removal and repacking of earth in an underground tunnel in Kilju, a remote area with no known mining, may indicate that North Korea is preparing a test, officials have said. But they also warn it could be a bluff.

On Wednesday in Tokyo, J. Thomas Schieffer, the United States ambassador to Japan, entered into that debate. He told officials of New Komeito, a pacifist party, that North Korea appeared to be moving toward a test, but he stopped short of saying they would conduct one.

"I believe they have taken some preparatory steps," the ambassador said, according to a United States Embassy official. Referring to the American-led regional effort to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear bombs, he added, "If there is a test, it would a be serious blow to the process." But the State Department was more cautious, with the spokesman in Washington, Richard A. Boucher, when asked whether Mr. Schieffer was indicating a test could be forthcoming, saying, "I wouldn't quite read as much into his statements as you do."

Japan is downwind of North Korea and could be affected by an open-air test. North Korea's arsenal of medium range missiles are believed to be intended as a potential threat to Japanese cities or American bases in Japan. On Wednesday night, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan played down North Korea's statement. "It has been making gamesmanship sort of remarks," he said of North Korea, according to Kyodo News Agency. "The point is we will have to get through to North Korea that returning quickly to the six-party talks and scrapping the nuclear program will best serve its interests."

Calls for a negotiated solution came Wednesday from officials in Washington, Beijing and Seoul, South Korea. "The provocative statements and actions by North Korea only further isolate it from the international community," Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, told reporters. "China obviously has considerable influence that they can use to help get North Korea back to the talks and get North Korea to end its nuclear ambitions." On Tuesday, a spokesman for China's Foreign Ministry ruled out applying economic or political sanctions to pressure North Korea.

South Korea also expressed concern. "Such a move by North Korea runs counter to moves to make the Korean peninsula free of nuclear weapons," South Korea's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Lee Kyu Hyun, said in a statement on the ministry Web site.

"North Korea seems to have extracted the fuel rods as a means of gaining advantage in future talks," Mr. Rhee, the vice minister of unification, told reporters in Seoul on Thursday, Bloomberg reported. "Still, its actions may negatively affect efforts to restart the six-party talks."

Thom Shanker and David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington for this article.

Nuclear Fuel Recycling: More Trouble Than It's Worth

This article was published by Scientific American Magazine on April 28, 2008.

Plans are afoot to reuse spent reactor fuel in the U.S. But the advantages of the scheme pale in comparison with its dangers

By Frank N. von Hippel

Although a dozen years have elapsed since any new nuclear power reactor has come online in the U.S., there are now stirrings of a nuclear renaissance. The incentives are certainly in place: the costs of natural gas and oil have skyrocketed; the public increasingly objects to the greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels; and the federal government has offered up to $8 billion in subsidies and insurance against delays in licensing (with new laws to streamline the process) and $18.5 billion in loan guarantees. What more could the moribund nuclear power industry possibly want?

Just one thing: a place to ship its used reactor fuel. Indeed, the lack of a disposal site remains a dark cloud hanging over the entire enterprise. The projected opening of a federal waste storage repository in Yucca Mountain in Nevada (now anticipated for 2017 at the earliest) has already slipped by two decades, and the cooling pools holding spent fuel at the nation’s nuclear power plants are running out of space.

Most nuclear utilities are therefore beginning to store older spent fuel on dry ground in huge casks, each typically containing 10 tons of waste. Every year a 1,000-megawatt reactor discharges enough fuel to fill two of these casks, each costing about $1 million. But that is not all the industry is doing. U.S. nuclear utilities are suing the federal government, because they would not have incurred such expenses had the U.S. Department of Energy opened the Yucca Mountain repository in 1998 as originally planned. As a result, the government is paying for the casks and associated infrastructure and operations—a bill that is running about $300 million a year.

Under pressure to start moving the fuel off the sites, the DOE has returned to an idea that it abandoned in the 1970s—to “reprocess” the spent fuel chemically, separating the different elements so that some can be reused. Vast reprocessing plants have been running in France and the U.K. for more than a decade, and Japan began to operate its own $20-billion facility in 2006. So this strategy is not without precedent. But, as I discuss below, reprocessing is an expensive and dangerous road to take.

The Element from Hell Grasping my reasons for rejecting nuclear fuel reprocessing requires nothing more than a rudimentary understanding of the nuclear fuel cycle and a dollop of common sense. Power reactors generate heat—which makes steam to turn electricity-generating turbines—by maintaining a nuclear chain reaction that splits (or “fissions”) atoms. Most of the time the fuel is uranium, artificially enriched so that 4 to 5 percent is the chain-reacting isotope uranium 235; virtually all the rest is uranium 238. At an enrichment of only 5 percent, stolen reactor fuel cannot be used to construct an illicit atom bomb.

In the reactor, some of the uranium 238 absorbs a neutron and becomes plutonium 239, which is also chain-reacting and can in principle be partially “burned” if it is extracted and properly prepared. This approach has various drawbacks, however. One is that extraction and processing cost much more than the new fuel is worth. Another is that recycling the plutonium reduces the waste problem only minimally. Most important, the separated plutonium can readily serve to make nuclear bombs if it gets into the wrong hands; as a result, much effort has to be expended to keep it secure until it is once more a part of spent fuel.

These drawbacks become strikingly clear when one examines the experiences of the nations that have embarked on reprocessing programs. In France, the world leader in reprocessing technology, the separated plutonium (chemically combined with oxygen to form plutonium dioxide) is mixed with uranium 238 (also as an oxide) to make a “mixed oxide,” or MOX, fuel. After being used to generate more power, the spent MOX fuel still contains about 70 percent as much plutonium as when it was manufactured; however, the addition of highly radioactive fission products created inside a reactor makes this plutonium difficult to access and make into a bomb. The used MOX fuel is shipped back to the reprocessing facility for indefinite storage. Thus, France is, in effect, using reprocessing to move its problem with spent fuel from the reactor sites to the reprocessing plant.

Japan is following France’s example. The U.K. and Russia simply store their separated civilian plutonium—about 120 tons between them as of the end of 2005, enough to make 15,000 atom bombs.

Until recently, France, Russia and the U.K. earned money by reprocessing the spent fuel of other nations, such as Japan and Germany, where domestic antinuclear activists demanded that the government either show it had a solution for dealing with spent fuel or shut down its reactors. Authorities in these nations found that sending their spent fuel abroad for reprocessing was a convenient, if costly, way to deal with their nuclear wastes—at least temporarily.

With such contracts in hand, France and the U.K. were easily able to finance new plants for carrying out reprocessing. Those agreements specified, however, that the separated plutonium and any highly radioactive waste would later go back to the country of origin. Russia has recently adopted a similar policy. Hence, governments that send spent fuel abroad need eventually to arrange storage sites for the returning radioactive waste. That reality took a while to sink in, but it has now convinced almost all nations that bought foreign reprocessing services that they might as well store their spent fuel and save the reprocessing fee of about $1 million per ton (10 times the cost of dry storage casks).

So France, Russia and the U.K. have lost virtually all their foreign customers. One result is that the U.K. plans to shut down its reprocessing plants within the next few years, a move that comes with a $92-billion price tag for cleaning up the site of these facilities. In 2000 France considered the option of ending reprocessing in 2010 and concluded that doing so would reduce the cost of nuclear electricity. Making such a change, though, might also engender acrimonious debates about nuclear waste—the last thing the French nuclear establishment wants in a country that has seen relatively little antinuclear activism.

Japan is even more politically locked into reprocessing: its nuclear utilities, unlike those of the U.S., have been unable to obtain permission to expand their on-site storage. Russia today has just a single reprocessing plant, with the ability to handle the spent fuel from only 15 percent of that country’s nuclear reactors. The Soviets had intended to expand their reprocessing capabilities but abandoned those plans when their economy collapsed in the 1980s.

During the cold war, the U.S. operated reprocessing plants in Washington State and South Carolina to recover plutonium for nuclear weapons. More than half of the approximately 100 tons of plutonium that was separated in those efforts has been declared to be in excess of our national needs, and the DOE currently projects that disposing of it will cost more than $15 billion. The people who were working at the sites where this reprocessing took place are now primarily occupied with cleaning up the resulting mess, which is expected to cost around $100 billion.

In addition to those military operations, a small commercial reprocessing facility operated in upstate New York from 1966 to 1972. It separated 1.5 tons of plutonium before going bankrupt and becoming a joint federal-state cleanup venture, one projected to require about $5 billion of taxpayers’ money.

With all the problems reprocessing entailed, one might rightly ask why it was pursued at all. Part of the answer is that for years after civilian nuclear power plants were first introduced, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) promoted reprocessing both domestically and abroad as essential to the future of nuclear power, because the industry was worried about running out of uranium (a concern that has since abated).

But that was before the security risks of plutonium production went from theoretical to real. In 1974 India, one of the countries that the U.S. assisted in acquiring reprocessing capabilities, used its first separated plutonium to build a nuclear weapon. At about this time, the late Theodore B. Taylor, a former U.S. nuclear weapons designer, was raising an alarm about the possibility that the planned separation and recycling of thousands of tons of plutonium every year would allow terrorists to steal enough of this material to make one or more nuclear bombs.

Separated plutonium, being only weakly radioactive, is easily carried off—whereas the plutonium in spent fuel is mixed with fission products that emit lethal gamma rays. Because of its great radioactivity, spent fuel can be transported only inside casks weighing tens of tons, and its plutonium can only be recovered with great difficulty, typically behind thick shielding using sophisticated, remotely operated equipment. So unseparated plutonium in spent fuel poses a far smaller risk of ending up in the wrong hands.

Having been awakened by India to the danger of nuclear weapons proliferation through reprocessing, the Ford administration (and later the Carter administration) reexamined the AEC’s position and concluded that reprocessing was both unnecessary and uneconomic. The U.S. government therefore abandoned its plans to reprocess the spent fuel from civilian reactors and urged France and Germany to cancel contracts under which they were exporting reprocessing technology to Pakistan, South Korea and Brazil.

The Reagan administration later reversed the Ford-Carter position on domestic reprocessing, but the U.S. nuclear industry was no longer interested. It, too, had concluded that reprocessing to make use of the recovered plutonium would not be economically competitive with the existing “once-through” fueling system. Reprocessing, at least in the U.S., had reached a dead end, or so it seemed.

Rising from Nuclear Ashes The current Bush administration has recently breathed life back into the idea of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel as part of its proposal to deploy a new generation of nuclear reactors. According to this vision, transuranics (plutonium and other similarly heavy elements extracted from conventional reactor fuel) would be recycled not once but repeatedly in the new reactors to break them down through fission into lighter elements, most of which have shorter half-lives. Consequently, the amount of nuclear waste needing to be safely stored for many millennia would be reduced [see “Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste,” by William H. Hannum, Gerald E. Marsh and George S. Stanford; Scientific American, December 2005]. Some scientists view this new scheme as “technically sweet,” to borrow a phrase J. Robert Oppen­heimer once used to describe the design for the hydrogen bomb. But is it really so wise?

The proposal to recycle U.S. spent fuel in this way is not new. Indeed, in the mid-1990s the DOE asked the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to carry out a study of this approach to reducing the amount of long-lived radioactive waste. The resulting massive report, Nuclear Wastes: Technologies for Separation and Transmutation, was very negative. The NAS panel concluded that recycling the transuranics in the first 62,000 tons of spent fuel (the amount that otherwise would have been stored in Yucca Mountain) would require “no less than $50 billion and easily could be over $100 billion”—in other words, it could well cost something like $500 for every person in the U.S. These numbers would have to be doubled to deal with the entire amount of spent fuel that existing U.S. reactors are expected to discharge during their lifetimes.

Why so expensive? Because conventional reactors could not be employed. Those use water both for cooling and for slowing down the neutrons given off when the uranium nuclei in the fuel break apart; this slowing allows the neutrons to induce other uranium 235 atoms to split, thereby sustaining a nuclear chain reaction. Feeding recycled fuel into such a reactor causes the heavier transuranics (plutonium 242, americium and curium) to accumulate. The proposed solution is a completely different type of nuclear reactor, one in which the neutrons get slowed less and are therefore able to break down these hard-to-crack atoms.

During the 1960s and 1970s the leading industrial countries, including the U.S., put the equivalent of more than 50 billion of today’s dollars into efforts to commercialize such fast-­neutron reactors, which are cooled by molten sodium rather than water. These devices were also called breeder reactors, because they were designed to generate more plutonium than they consumed and therefore could be much more efficient in using the energy in uranium. The expectation was that breeders would quickly replace conventional water-cooled reactors. But sodium-cooled reactors proved to be much more costly to build and troublesome to operate than expected, and most countries abandoned their efforts to commercialize them.

It is exactly this failed reactor type that the DOE now proposes to develop and deploy—but with its core reconfigured to be a net plutonium burner rather than a breeder. The U.S. would have to build between 40 and 75 1,000-megawatt reactors of this type to be able to break down transuranics at the rate they are being generated in the nation’s 104 conventional reactors. If each of the new sodium-cooled reactors cost $1 billion to $2 billion more than one of its water-cooled cousins of the same capacity, the federal subsidy necessary would be anywhere from $40 billion to $150 billion, in addition to the $100 billion to $200 billion required for building and operating the recycling infrastructure. Given the U.S. budget deficit, it seems unlikely that such a program would actually be carried through.

If a full-scale reprocessing plant were constructed (as the DOE until recently was proposing to do by 2020) but the sodium-cooled reactors did not get built, virtually all the separated transuranics would simply go into indefinite storage. This awkward situation is exactly what befell the U.K., where the reprocessing program, started in the 1960s, has produced about 80 tons of separated plutonium, a legacy that will cost tens of billions of dollars to dispose of safely.

Reprocessing spent fuel and then storing the separated plutonium and radioactive waste indefinitely at the reprocessing plant is not a disposal strategy. Rather it is a strategy for disaster, because it makes the separated plutonium much more vulnerable to theft. In a 1998 report the U.K.’s Royal Society (the equivalent of the NAS), commenting on the growing stockpile of civilian plutonium in that country, warned that “the chance that the stocks of plutonium might, at some stage, be accessed for illicit weapons production is of extreme concern.” In 2007 a second Royal Society report reiterated that “the status quo of continuing to stockpile a very dangerous material is not an acceptable long-term option.”

Clearly, prudence demands that plutonium should not be stored at a reprocessing facility in a form that could readily be stolen. Indeed, common sense dictates that it should not be separated at all. Until a long-term repository is available, spent reactor fuel can remain at the sites of the nuclear power plants that generated it.

Would such storage be dangerous? I would argue that keeping older fuel produced by the once-through system in dry storage casks represents a negligible addition to the existing nuclear hazard to the surrounding population. The 10 kilowatts of radioactive heat generated by the 10 tons of 20-year-old fuel packed in a dry storage cask is carried off convectively as it warms the air around it. Terrorists intent on doing harm might attempt to puncture such a cask using, say, an antitank weapon or the engine of a crashing aircraft, but under most circumstances only a small mass of radioactive fuel fragments would be scattered about a limited area. In contrast, if the coolant in the nearby reactor were cut off, its fuel would overheat and begin releasing huge quantities of vaporized fission products within minutes. And if the water were lost in a storage pool containing spent fuel, the zirconium cladding of the fuel rods would be heated up to ignition temperature within hours. Seen in this light, dry storage casks look pretty benign.

Is there enough physical room to keep them? Yes, there is plenty of space for more casks at U.S. nuclear power plants. Even the oldest operating U.S. reactors are having their licenses extended for another 20 years, and new reactors will likely be built on the same sites. So there is no reason to think that these storage areas are about to disappear. Eventually, of course, it will be necessary to remove the spent fuel and put it elsewhere, but there is no need to panic and adopt a policy of reprocessing, which would only make the situation much more dangerous and costly than it is today.

Fear and Loathing in Nevada The long-term fate of radioactive waste in the U.S. hinges on how the current impasse over Yucca Mountain is resolved. Opinion on the site is divided. The regulatory requirements are tough: the DOE has to show that the mountain will contain the waste well enough to prevent significant off-site doses for a million years.

Demonstrating safety that far into the future is not easy, but the risks from even a badly designed repository are negligible in comparison with those from a policy that would make nuclear weapons materials more accessible. From this perspective, it is difficult to understand why the danger of local radioactive pollution 100,000 or a million years hence has generated so much more political passion in the U.S. than the continuing imminent danger from nuclear weapons.

Part of the problem is the view in Nevada that the Reagan administration and Congress acted unfairly in 1987 when they cut short an objective evaluation of other candidate sites and designated Yucca Mountain as the location for the future nuclear waste repository. To overcome this perception, it may be necessary to reopen deliberations for choosing an additional site. Such a move should not be difficult. Indeed, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1987 requires the secretary of energy to report to Congress by 2010 on the need for a second storage facility. Given the disastrous record of the DOE in dealing with radioactive waste, however, consideration should also be given to establishing a more specialized and less politicized agency for this purpose.

In the meantime, spent fuel can be safely stored at the reactor sites in dry casks. And even after it is placed in a geologic repository, it would remain retrievable for at least a century. So in the unlikely event that technology or economic circumstances change drastically enough that the benefits of reprocessing exceed the costs and risks, that option would still be available. But it makes no sense now to rush into an expensive and potentially catastrophic undertaking on the basis of uncertain hopes that it might reduce the long-term environmental burden from the nuclear power industry.

Editor's Note: This story was originally printed with the title "Rethinking Nuclear Fuel Recycling"

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http://alsos.wlu.edu/adv_rst.aspx?query=reprocessing&selection=Keyword&source=all&results=10&keyword=reprocessing

https://www.osti.gov/opennet/document/purecov/nfsrepo.html

Plutonium Recovery from Spent Fuel Reprocessing by Nuclear Fuel Services at West Valley, New York from 1966 to 1972

Prepared by U.S. Department of Energy, February 1996

Table of Contents

Executive Summary

This report provides a detailed accounting of the separated plutonium received by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), a predecessor to the Department of Energy (DOE), from Nuclear Fuel Services (NFS), which operated a commercial spent fuel reprocessing facility located near West Valley, New York, 35 miles south of Buffalo. The NFS facility was the first and only private plant in the U.S. to reprocess spent nuclear fuel. NFS began receiving spent nuclear fuel at West Valley in 1965, and operated the facility from 1966 to 1972 to chemically separate and recover plutonium and uranium from the fuel.

In total, the plant recovered 1926 kilograms (kg) of plutonium and shipped almost 80% of the material (1530 kg) to the AEC. The remaining plutonium, 396 kg, either was retained by the utility companies, sold to industry by the utilities, or purchased by NFS and later re-sold to industry for use in plutonium recycle operations.

Of the 1530 kg of separated plutonium received by the AEC from the NFS West Valley facility, 635 kg originated from fuel or reactors that were AEC-owned and 895 kg came from commercial power- reactor fuel. The AEC purchased the 895 kg of commercial power-reactor plutonium from the utility companies under a program named the Plutonium Credit Activity which was established by the U.S. Congress in the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.

• Of the 635 kg of AEC-origin plutonium, most came from N-Reactor, a plutonium production reactor at the Hanford site near Richland, Washington. Specifically, 534 kg of plutonium came from N-Reactor, 95 kg from the Nuclear Fuels Services facility in Erwin, Tennessee, and 6 kg from the Bonus Reactor, an AEC-owned demonstration reactor in Puerto Rico.
• Of the 895 kg of separated plutonium purchased by the AEC from the utility companies, 436 kg was from Yankee Atomic Electric Company (Yankee Rowe), 285 kg from Commonwealth Edison Company (Dresden-1), 63 kg from Consumers Power Company (Big Rock Point), 7 kg from Northern States Power Company (Pathfinder), and 104 kg from Consolidated Edison Company (Indian Point-1).

All of the AEC-owned and -purchased plutonium was shipped as plutonium nitrate solution from NFS to the Hanford site. These shipments were made by commercial truck in accordance with applicable transportation regulations. Most of the plutonium received by the AEC from NFS was used in breeder reactor and zero-power reactor programs. To meet the isotopic and physical requirements for these programs, the NFS plutonium was blended with other plutonium and converted to either metal or oxide. The isotopic composition of the power reactor plutonium generally precluded its use in weapons production, even after blending, and there is no indication that blending occurred for that purpose.

Purpose

The purpose of this report is to provide a detailed account of the separated plutonium received by the AEC from NFS, a commercial spent fuel reprocessing facility located near West Valley, New York, 35 miles south of Buffalo. This document is part of a larger effort to respond to the Secretary of Energy's June 27, 1994, announced goal to declassify and release detailed plutonium information (See the DOE report, Plutonium: the First 50 Years, February 1996). This report is the first comprehensive look at NFS West Valley reprocessing operations and is the result of an exhaustive search of open literature, historical memoranda, and nuclear material accountability records.

Background

In 1953, the U.S. announced the Atoms for Peace Program. This program signaled a shift in U.S. policy from closely guarding all information about nuclear science to encouraging peaceful uses of nuclear energy at home and abroad. The agreements implementing this program allowed a sharing of information about industrial applications of nuclear energy, including nuclear fuel reprocessing techniques, while discouraging nuclear weapons proliferation. This change in U.S. policy set the stage for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).

• The IAEA was established in the late 1950s to encourage the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes and to provide safeguards against proliferation; the safeguards were designed to detect, rather than to prevent, the diversion of nuclear materials.
• The NPT was ratified in 1968 and became effective in 1970, and in 1995 the NPT was extended indefinitely. Currently, more than 170 nations are adherents to this treaty. The NPT provides for the right of each participant to engage in peaceful nuclear activities, including spent fuel reprocessing. Nations not already in possession of nuclear weapons agreed not to develop themand to accept IAEA-directed safeguards for all peaceful nuclear activities under their control.

The objective of the Atoms for Peace Program was to promote the domestic and international exploration, development, and advancement of the technology necessary to build and operate reliable, economic nuclear power plants; to provide cooperative assistance in establishing a self-sufficient nuclear power industry; and to ensure the development and use of nuclear energy in electric power production and salt water desalination.

To insure a self-sufficient, domestic commercial nuclear power industry, the AEC encouraged the transfer of nuclear fuel reprocessing from the federal government to private industry. As a result of this policy, three commercial reprocessing facilities were built in the U.S.: General Electric s Midwest Fuel Recovery Plant at Morris, Illinois; Allied General Nuclear Services (AGNS) plant at Barnwell, South Carolina; Nuclear Fuel Service's facility located near West Valley, New York.

Optimism about the future growth of the nuclear industry led the State of New York to set aside 3345 acres near West Valley, New York, and to encourage nuclear industries to locate there. Although fuel reprocessing had been practiced in the U.S. since 1944, large-scale fuel reprocessing in the U.S. had been conducted only at DOE facilities in Idaho, South Carolina, and Washington State, until NFS began operations at West Valley, NY.

The NFS West Valley facility was the first and only private plant in the U.S. to reprocess spent nuclear fuel. The NFS facility was a PUREX (Plutonium Uranium Extraction) process plant with a design capacity of 300 tons of fuel per year. The PUREX process included storing spent fuel assemblies; chopping the assembly rods; dissolving the uranium, plutonium, and radioactive products in acid; separating and storing the radioactive wastes, and separating uranium nitrate from plutonium nitrate. Two other commercial reprocessing facilities were built in the United States, but never operated.

• The General Electric's Midwest Fuel Recovery Plant (also 300 tons per year) at Morris, Illinois, adjacent to the site of the Commonwealth Edison Company Dresden reactors, was completed at a cost of $64 million but was declared inoperable in 1974.
• In 1970, Allied General Nuclear Services (AGNS) began construction of a 1500 tons per year reprocessing plant at Barnwell, South Carolina, adjacent to the DOE Savannah River site. The Barnwell facility was due to begin operation in 1974, but following delays in construction and licensing, it still had not been completed or licensed when in 1977 President Carter decided to defer indefinitely all reprocessing of commercial irradiated fuel.

In the spring of 1963, the AEC issued the necessary permits to NFS, a subsidiary of the W.R. Grace Company (NFS was acquired by the Getty Oil Company in 1969), to begin construction of a fuel reprocessing facility. NFS was granted a license on May 27, 1965 to receive and store fuel at its reprocessing facility in West Valley. The first shipment of fuel, from the Yankee Rowe reactor in Massachusetts, was placed in the fuel storage pool at West Valley on June 5, 1965. Government and commercially-generated fuel continued to be received at NFS until 1973. There were a total of 756 truck and rail shipments.

The AEC encouraged NFS to focus on commercial fuel reprocessing; however, the AEC guaranteed a minimum quantity of government fuel to NFS in the absence of sufficient commercial supplies. Sufficient commercial supplies were not available because there were not many operating commercial reactors during the NFS reprocessing period of 1966 to 1972. As a result, approximately 60% of the facility's supply of fuel and 33% of the plutonium came from AEC reactors. Specifically, a majority of this came from N-Reactor.

In 1972, NFS (now owned by the Getty Oil Company) halted all reprocessing operations in order to increase reprocessing capacity, and to alter the facility to meet new regulatory requirements. However, subsequent difficulties were encountered in retrofitting the facility to meet these requirements and, after four years of fruitless negotiations with federal and state regulatory authorities, NFS announced its intention to cease reprocessing operations and transfer the management and long-term storage of approximately 600,000 gallons of high-level radioactive liquids and sludges at the West Valley Site to the site's landlord, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. This transfer was in accordance with contractual obligations.

By 1980, the West Valley Demonstration Project Act (WVDPA) (Public Law 96-368) directed the DOE to solidify the high-level radioactive waste at West Valley to borosilicate glass, suitable for permanent storage in an approved federal repository. The WVDPA also directed the Department to decontaminate and decommission the tanks and facilities used at West Valley, and dispose of the low-level and transuranic wastes.

The West Valley Nuclear Services Company, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Westinghouse Electric Corporation, was selected in 1981 as the prime contractor for the WVDPA. West Valley Nuclear Services Company has operated the West Valley site for the U.S. Department of Energy since 1982.

NFS West Valley Reprocessing Campaigns

There were a total of 27 processing campaigns performed at West Valley, however, only the first 26 campaigns reprocessed intact reactor fuel. The last campaign involved processing liquid residues received from Nuclear Fuels Services facility in Erwin, Tennessee, generated during the fabrication of fuel for the SEFOR reactor. Table 1 provides a summary of the NFS fuel reprocessing campaigns including the amount of plutonium recovered. The material reprocessed by NFS, summarized by source in Table 2, was both government and commercially-generated. In both tables the quantities of "Plutonium Received" were based on shipper's data, i.e., theoretical calculations of plutonium produced in the reactors.

The "Recovered Plutonium" is the actual amount of plutonium recovered by NFS. The difference between the often imprecise theoretical calculations of plutonium produced in reactors versus the measurement of the amount actually recovered is called an inventory difference. When the recovered amount is larger than the received amount, the shipper may have under estimated the amount of plutonium produced in the reactor.

Other factors that contribute to the difference between received and recovered plutonium include the measurement uncertainty, process holdup, and normal operating losses/ measured discards. Normal operating losses/measured discards occur when known quantities of plutonium are intentionally removed from the inventory because they are technically or economically unrecoverable and are disposed of by approved methods. Two examples of normal operating losses are liquid discards to waste storage tanks, and solid waste packaged in drums and crates awaiting shipment to waste disposal facilities generically referred to as "burial sites." Examples of plutonium-bearing items sent to burial sites include discarded piping, spent ion exchange equipment, and contaminated laundry and shoe covers.

The AEC-owned plutonium came from the following:

• The Hanford N- Reactor, a production reactor formerly called the New Production Reactor, is located near Richland, Washington, about 150 miles southeast of Seattle. This reactor is owned and was operated by the AEC. N-Reactor was designed as a dual-purpose reactor for the production of plutonium and the production of by-product steam for electricity generation. It was a graphite-moderated, pressurized light water- cooled reactor. N-Reactor operated from 1963 to 1987.
• The Bonus Reactor, a demonstration boiling water reactor, was located at Ricon, about 75 miles west of San Juan, Puerto Rico. This reactor featured high-temperature, superheated steam and was owned by the AEC but operated by the Puerto Rico Water Resources Authority. The Bonus reactor began operation in 1964 and was permanently shut down in 1968.
• The remainder of the material came from the Nuclear Fuels Services facility in Erwin, Tennessee, and was in the form of liquid residues generated during the fabrication of reactor fuel for the Southwest Experimental Fast Oxide Reactor (SEFOR), an experimental reactor, located near Strickler, Arkansas. SEFOR was built by the Southwest Atomic Energy Associates [Note a] for testing liquid metal fast breeder reactor fuel. SEFOR began operations in 1969 and was permanently shut down in 1972.

The remaining fuel came from seven commercial nuclear power reactors that were owned and operated by commercial utility companies.

• The Big Rock Point Nuclear Power Plant. This boiling water reactor, owned and operated by Consumers Power Company, is located on Lake Michigan near Charlevoix, Michigan, about 200 miles northwest of Detroit. Big Rock Point has operated since 1963.
• CVTR, Carolinas-Virginia Tube Reactor. This pressurized heavy water tube reactor, owned and operated by Carolinas-Virginia Nuclear Power Associates was located in Parr, South Carolina, about 25 miles northwest of Columbia. This reactor began operation in 1964 and was permanently shut down in 1967.
• Dresden Nuclear Power Station, Unit #1. This boiling water reactor, owned and operated by Commonwealth Edison Company, was located near Morris, Illinois, about 50 miles southwest of Chicago. Dresden-1 commenced operation in 1960 and was permanently shut down in 1978.
• Humboldt Bay Nuclear Plant. This boiling water reactor, owned and operated by the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, was located on Humboldt Bay near Eureka, California, about 200 miles north of San Francisco. This plant commenced operation in 1963 and was permanently shut down in 1976.
• Indian Point Nuclear Power Station, Unit #1. This pressurized water reactor, owned and operated by the Consolidated Edison Company, was located on the Hudson River at Buchanan, New York, about 35 miles north of New York City. Indian Point began operation in 1962 and was permanently shut down in 1974.
• Pathfinder Nuclear Power Plant. This experimental, boiling water reactor, owned and operated by the Northern States Power Company, was located on the Big Sioux River, near Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Pathfinder began operations in 1964 and was permanently shut down in 1967.
• Yankee Atomic Electric Power Station. This pressurized water reactor, owned and operated by the Yankee Atomic Electric Company, was located near Rowe, Massachusetts, about 45 miles east of Albany, New York. This reactor began operation in 1960 and was permanently shut down in 1992.

NFS West Valley Plutonium Shipments to the AEC

In the 1950's, commercial utilities began returning fuel to the Atomic Energy Commission under a program called the Plutonium Credit Activity. This program, established by the U.S. Congress in the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, provided "credit" for plutonium produced in commercial nuclear reactors operating on fuel purchased or leased from the AEC. Although the uranium in the civilian power reactor industry in the 1950's and early 1960's was owned by the AEC and leased to the utility companies, the plutonium produced during operation of these reactors was owned by the utility companies.

The Plutonium Credit Activity program began in 1957 and ended in 1970. The U.S. Government paid the utilities approximately $10.4 million for approximately 900 kg of plutonium. All of the plutonium purchased under this program was reprocessed at the NFS facility and shipped to the Hanford site with the exception of 2.5 kg plutonium from the Vallecitos Boiling Water Reactor that was reprocessed at the Savannah River site.

Both the AEC-owned plutonium and the plutonium purchased by the AEC under the Plutonium Credit Activity (1530 kg total) listed in Table 3, were shipped to the Hanford site as plutonium nitrate solution. The liquid shipments were by commercial truck in accordance with applicable transportation regulations.

Of the 1530 kg of separated plutonium received by the Hanford site from the NFS facility, 635 kg came from fuel or reactors that were AEC-owned, and the remaining 895 kg came from the commercial power-reactor fuel.

• Of the 635 kg of the AEC-origin plutonium, the majority came from N-Reactor, a plutonium production reactor at the Hanford site near Richland, Washington. Specifically, 534 kg of plutonium came from N-Reactor, 95 kg from the Nuclear Fuels Services facility in Erwin, Tennessee, and 6 kg from the Bonus Nuclear Electrical Station, an AEC-owned demonstration reactor.
• Of the 895 kg of separated plutonium purchased by the AEC from the utility companies, 436 kg was from Yankee Atomic Electric Company (Yankee Rowe), 285 kg from Commonwealth Edison Company (Dresden-1), 63 kg from Consumers Power Company (Big Rock Point), 7 kg from Northern States Power Company (Pathfinder), and 104 kg from Consolidated Edison Company (Indian Point-1).

Most of the plutonium the AEC received from the NFS facility was used in the breeder reactor and the zero power reactor programs. To meet the isotopic and physical requirements for these programs, the NFS plutonium was blended with other plutonium and then converted to either a metal or an oxide. Even by blending, the isotopic mixture of the power reactor plutonium generally precluded its use in weapons production and there is no indication that blending for that purpose occurred.

NFS West Valley Plutonium Shipments to Others

As shown in Table 4, not all of the NFS separated power-reactor plutonium was sold to the AEC. A total of 396 kg of separated power-reactor plutonium was either retained by the utility companies, sold by the utility company to industry, or purchased by NFS and later sold for use in plutonium recycle operations. Of that total, almost 60% was shipped from the NFS West Valley facility to foreign countries for use in research or as fuel for foreign breeder-reactor programs.

• A total of 221 kg plutonium was shipped to West Germany for use at the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center. Several reactors are located at the Center, and it is Germany's most important applied research installation engaged in breeder- reactor research. Work on fast breeders has been carried out at Karlsruhe since 1960, with Euratom support of the breeder work starting in 1963.
• A total of 10 kg plutonium was shipped to the United Kingdom's Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. The two experimental zero-power reactors at Harwell provided basic physics information on fast-reactor cores.
• Approximately 1 kg of plutonium was sent to the Santa Maria O'Galeria, Plutonium Research and Development Center in Casaccia, Italy.
• The remaining 164 kg of plutonium was sent from the NFS West Valley facility to domestic companies, i.e., Babcock & Wilcox Plutonium Laboratory in Leechburg, Pennsylvania, the Westinghouse Electric Plutonium Development Laboratory in Cheswick, Pennsylvania, and the Nuclear Fuels Services facility in Erwin, Tennessee, for use in research or the fabrication of reactor fuel.

Note

a. The Southwest Atomic Energy Associates consisted of seventeen U.S. investor-owned utilities, the Federal Republic of Germany, the General Electric Company, and Euratom. Euratom, the European Atomic Energy Community, is an organization that promotes the growth of nuclear power production in Europe. Its members are Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and The Netherlands.

Return to February 6, 1996, Press Conference Documents

http://www.sea-us.org.au/no2reactor/sa-pollies.html

Radioactive Wastes :

A Briefing Paper on the National Waste Dump

Introduction

There is currently a proposal for a national facility for the disposal of low-level and short-lived intermediate-level radioactive waste. This dump will be sited in a region of South Australia. Many believe that the wastes will come from hospitals and universities. However, 70% of the bulk of this waste will come from the Lucas Heights site run by the Australia Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO). The majority of radioactivity destined for the site will, however, be contained in the more highly radioactive long-lived intermediate level wastes - from reprocessed spent fuel and from isotope production (and possibly in spent nuclear fuel itself) - which it is planned to place in the store at the site until such time as a deep geological repository is established.

Option 1 Almost half the spent nuclear fuel currently held at Lucas Heights will be returned to the US for storage/disposal. It is proposed that the remaining fuel rods, and that produced by the proposed new reactor, will be reprocessed overseas. This process separates the unused uranium from the fission products and plutonium - which will be returned as either long-lived intermediate level waste (LLILW) or as high level waste (HLW) for storage in a facility next to the national nuclear dump site.

ANSTO had based its spent fuel management programme on sending the spent fuel to Dounreay in Scotland. As Dounreay is now no longer accepting foreign spent nuclear fuel, the only remaining option is to send the fuel to Sellafield in England or La Hague in France. Current contracts with the UK and France state that the waste returned must contain the same amount of radioactivity as that contained in the spent fuel sent for reprocessing - a curie for curie deal. Further, the preferred option for the UK and France is to send back HLW from reprocessing. However, as ANSTO claims that the government will not accept HLW, this issue remains to be resolved. It is important to note that the only significant difference between LLILW and HLW is that the latter is heat-generating. LLILW contains many of the same radioisotopes as HLW, a number of which have long half-lives e.g. Plutonium-239 (24,000 yrs), Americium-241 (433 yrs).

However, regardless of the final form of the waste returned a considerable amount of radioactivity will eventually sent back to Australia in the waste residues from reprocessing. The EIS on the proposed new reactor (pp.10.15) notes that of the current spent nuclear fuel stockpile, fifty per-cent is to be sent overseas for reprocessing.

Half of the spent fuel stockpile at a June 1998 (1425) 712

Fuel arising for the remainder of 1998, approx. 17

Fuel arising from 1999-2003 185

Total 914

The above figures show the amount which would remain to be reprocessed and from which waste would be returned. Using figures supplied by ANSTO a rough estimate of the total amount of radioactivity in the waste can be given. In 1992, ANSTO wrote that the stockpile of 1500 fuel rods had a total radioactive inventory of 3,000,000 curies, which equals approximately 2,000 curies per fuel rod. Using an equivalence figures the waste returned would contain 1,828,000 curies. Dounreay has already been sent 264 fuel rods sent for reprocessing (150 in 1963 and 114 in 1996) from which waste also has to be returned. This would give an additional 528,000 curies, adding to the inventory of radioactivity returned, giving a total of 2,356,000 curies.

In addition to this there will also be the LLILW from the production of medical and industrial isotopes at Lucas Heights which is also destined for storage. This material also contains a considerable amount of radioactivity, as well as long-lived radioisotopes. If the new reactor goes ahead the isotope production will increase four-fold, with a corresponding increase in the amount of radioactivity in the waste. There are no figures for the amount of radioactivity which would be in the spent nuclear fuel from the new reactor except that approximately the same number of fuel rods, 37 per year, would be produced over an operating period of 40 years. Ultimately the spent fuel and/or waste from the second reactor would go for storage and, in theory, then be disposed of.

Option 2: If reprocessing contracts do not eventuate for the spent nuclear fuel stockpile (and future irradiated fuel rods) they might be sent directly for storage at the national nuclear dump site. Indeed, this option has been available for some time. In 1990 the NHMRC codes for the ‘disposal’ of radioactive waste created the option for storage when Category S waste was introduced (the ultimate disposal of which is not actually covered by any codes). As the EIS notes, in the unlikely event that "the overseas option (for reprocessing) should become unavailable it would be possible at short notice to take advantage of the off-the-shelf dry storage casks for extended interim storage at the national storage facility, pending renewed arrangements being negotiated for the reprocessing/conditioning or the fuel".(p. 10.18 EIS).

ANSTO, insists, however, that the spent fuel from the current reactor has to be reprocessed or conditioned and it is not suitable for direct disposal. ANSTO has also said that the fuel for the new reactor will be designed so that it can be stored long-term, but that this too would also have to be reprocessed or conditioned prior to disposal. ANSTO have said that they are not seeking a fuel type which would be suitable for direct disposal (the US Department of Energy is currently investigating non-conditioning direct disposal of the type of spent nuclear fuel currently used by the Lucas Heights reactor).

Option 3: Send the spent nuclear fuel for storage at the dump site and condition the waste there or condition the waste at Lucas Heights and send the resulting waste to South Australia for storage. ‘Conditioning’ means partial reprocessing, that is the dissolution of the spent nuclear fuel in acid, without separation of the uranium or plutonium. Conditioning in Australia is not an entirely unrealistic scenario. In its 1996 review of radioactive waste management ANSTO outlined following plan for spent nuclear fuel:

• take up the UK offer of a four-year reprocessing program for the UK-origin spent fuel,
• after that four year period, ship the remaining (US-origin) HIFAR and MOATA spent fuel to the US over a seven year period
• if appropriate, prepare a proposal for the domestic conditioning of spent fuel from HIFAR and any replacement reactor.

Since 1996 the ‘conditioning’ option was explored for the spent fuel at the Lucas Heights – and was soundly rejected. The local MP is adamantly opposed to such a proposal, as are the unions representing workers on site and the local residents. Whether such reprocessing/conditioning would necessarily take place overseas, or at the national nuclear dump site now becomes the key issue. There is certainly no guarantee that the spent nuclear fuel remaining, or that which will be created, will be reprocessed overseas. In April of this year ANSTO stated it was confident that the fuel rods would be reprocessed at Dounreay – an idea that had to be abandoned only weeks later.

Political pressures are being brought to bear on both Sellafield and La Hague to clean up their operations. There is ever-increasing pressure for the actual closure of both facilities coming from political parties, environment groups and affected populations. The idea that these reprocessing plants will be operating in ten or twenty years, let alone until 2043 when the proposed new reactor will close, is something which has to be discussed now. However, if such plants are open and if they take the spent fuel there is still the long-term issue of all the radioactivity coming back – for storage at South Australia.

Disposal

In theory both HLW and LLILW should ultimately be disposed of in a deep geological repository. Many national nuclear agencies have encountered major technical and financial problems, and political opposition, when pursuing such proposals. Only last year, the UK’s nuclear waste agency, NIREX, was forced to abandon plans to site an exploratory rock laboratory near the Sellafield reprocessing plant. That decision, made by the Conservative government, came after official inquiries concluded the proposal was unsound. The normally pro-nuclear regional authority, Cumbria County Council, also rejected the scheme. Having spent 14 years searching for a deep geological repository, and having spent $430 million, a nuclear waste site could not be found even in the ‘nuclear heartland’ of West Cumbria. Quite how long the higher-level wastes will remain stored in South Australia is, therefore, open to question. A the Department of Primary Industry & Energy has noted "the small quantity of Category S waste produced by Australia cannot presently justify the cost of constructing a geological disposal facility." Would the government establish a repository for direct disposal of spent fuel? In 1995 Commonwealth Environment Protection Agency noted:

"Direct disposal in Australia (of spent fuel rods). Direct disposal of spent research reactor fuel would raise significant policy and technical problems such as operation of deep geological repositories.

ANSTO – Conflict of Interest

There is a clear conflict of interest in ANSTO acting as an adviser to the government on the matter of radioactive waste disposal. ANSTO produces the bulk of radioactive waste for the Commonwealth – a government report from 1992 shows that ANSTO held 70% of the national total of low-level waste on site at Lucas Heights. ANSTO also produces the spent nuclear fuel and isotope wastes which contain the majority of radioactivity in Commonwealth wastes. Local residents and a number of politicians have expressed their concern at Lucas Heights remaining as the de facto national nuclear dump. In 1995 the Commonwealth EPA.

" Storage at Lucas Heights. Storage at Lucas Heights of HIFAR spent fuel has been safely carried out on site for over thirty years. However, continued accumulation of spent fuel at Lucas Heights defers the problem of eventual disposal, and invites opposition from local residents and local government." (emphasis added)

It is crucial to this debate to understand the political problems of keeping spent nuclear fuel, and other wastes, at Lucas Heights - particularly at a time when a new reactor is being proposed. Government agencies recognise this, and they also know establishing a deep geologic repository for the more radioactive materials or for spent fuel will also prove problematic. What then is the likelihood of building a final disposal facility elsewhere in Australia once a store is firmly established in South Australia?

About the author: Since 1980 Jean McSorley has worked as a campaigner on the nuclear industry in Europe, Australia and Asia. She was formerly coordinator of the Nuclear & Energy campaign in Asia for Greenpeace International. She holds a Master of Policy Studies from the University of New South Wales and is author of ‘Living in the Shadow, the Story of the People of Sellafield’ (Pan books, 1990). Contact mcsorley@compassnet.com.au. Tel (h) 02 9658 3265 or mobile 0417 662 720

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Many thanks to Jean McSorley for supplying this article to SEA-US Inc.

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Page last updated October 31, 1998.

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Nuclear fuel recycling shouldn't be shelved again

Transmutation of transuranics (TRUs) and fission products that are recovered from spent fuel offers potential for improving the technology for long-term disposal of radioactive waste. Successful implementation of this integrated reprocessing/irradiation strategy would require a major financial commitment to the development, design, construction, and operation of a series of reprocessing plants and transmutation reactors based largely on as-yet unproven technology.

This appendix addresses various economic issues related to the use of transmutation as a primary waste management strategy, focusing primarily on future reprocessing costs under various plant ownership and financing arrangements. It also addresses the substantial institutional barriers that would inhibit private-sector financing of such a strategy in the United States.

The nuclear industry of the early 1970s was characterized by rapidly increasing worldwide demand for generating commercial nuclear power capacity, rising uranium prices, and an impending shortage of uranium enrichment capacity. There was a consensus within the nuclear community that spent reactor fuel would be reprocessed to recover residual uranium and plutonium for recycle in light-water reactors (LWRs) and ultimately to fuel breeder reactors. Projected reprocessing costs were low, and there appeared to be an urgent need to reduce the rapidly increasing demand for virgin uranium in order to stem rising prices and prepare for early introduction of breeders. U.S. enrichment capacity was sufficiently committed by 1972 that the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) closed the books on new orders for enrichment services.

Reprocessing and uranium and plutonium recycle in LWRs was expected to reduce total fuel-cycle cost relative to a once-through fuel-management scheme. Confidence that a reduction in cost would be realized was supported by commercial contracts for reprocessing services at unit prices below $20/kgHM in the late 1960s. The initial estimates of the cost premium for MOX fuel fabrication were as little as 20% above the comparable cost of fabricating virgin uranium fuel. Spent fuel was expected to be reprocessed within approximately 6 months following discharge from the reactor, so that recovered uranium and plutonium could be returned to the reactor with minimal delay.

Through the late 1960s, the U.S. outlook for nuclear power plants and for fuel-cycle facilities to undertake commercial uranium and plutonium recycle facilities was favorable. Two commercial facilities for reprocessing LWR spent fuel were constructed. The General Electric

plant at Morris, Illinois, was completed in 1968, and the Allied-General Nuclear Services plant at Barnwell, South Carolina, was completed in 1974. However, neither plant went into commercial service.

The 20-year period of nuclear optimism began to wane in about 1970 with growing public apprehension over the possibility of a major nuclear accident. This in turn prompted criticism of the AEC, which had the dual responsibilities for developing and promoting nuclear power and for regulating its implementation in the private sector. The passage in 1970 of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) fundamentally changed the ground rules for nuclear plant siting and construction. NEPA added a requirement for the preparation of an environmental impact statement for all new major facilities, with provisions for public hearings on the statement before a construction permit could be issued.

Public dissatisfaction with AEC management of nuclear issues heightened with the revelations attending the cancellation of the planned high-level waste (HLW) repository near Lyons, Kansas. The public became aware that an approved waste repository site had not yet been secured to receive the steadily increasing quantity of spent fuel, as well as HLW from defense operations. In 1974 the Ford administration divided the AEC into two new organizations that separated the responsibilities for nuclear development and regulation. The new organizations were the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). At the same time, Congress disbanded the powerful Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and reassigned its responsibilities among several congressional committees.

A new public concern arose when India tested a ''peaceful nuclear explosion" in 1974, rekindling an earlier controversy over the postulated link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons proliferation. This concern was heightened by the revelation that the Indian nuclear explosive contained nuclear weapons material produced in a reactor that was sold to India by Canada. The Indian nuclear test made it necessary for many nations, including several developing countries, to acquire their own facilities to enrich uranium or recover plutonium from spent reactor fuel. The growing controversy associated with the widespread commercial use of plutonium recycle came to a head in the highly contentious hearings on the Generic Environmental Statement on Mixed Oxide (GESMO) fuel, which the NRC had begun in late 1974 and which the Carter administration finally canceled in 1977.

In 1977, the Carter administration completed a review, begun by the Ford administration, of the plans to commercialize the breeder reactor and engage in plutonium recycle in the United States. In addition to placing greater emphasis on nonproliferation concerns, this review was based on projections of the growth in electric power demand that were much lower than the earlier projections of the AEC up to the mid-1970s. This reappraisal soon led to cancellation of breeder commercialization and plutonium recycle, leaving the Barnwell reprocessing plant without an operating license or a mission.

From 1977 to 1979, the United States joined other nations in the International Fuel Cycle Evaluation to reconsider the commercial use of plutonium. The U.S. Congress passed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1978, which placed restraints on foreign reprocessing of nuclear fuel of U.S. origin.

Several nations took issue with the change in nuclear ground rules implemented unilaterally by the United States. However, most ultimately agreed that steps to limit reprocessing and recycle would be prudent, although they retained reprocessing as a long-term option. The International Fuel Cycle Evaluation also reached agreement that spent fuel itself was a waste form that could be safely disposed of in a waste repository. Indeed, by 1977, the United States was strongly recommending that course, which was adopted and further promoted by several other nations, notably Sweden, that had small nuclear programs. However, the European reprocessors and Japan continued their plans to reprocess spent fuel from commercial reactors and to store the separated plutonium pending further development of their breeder programs.

When the U.S. ban on domestic fuel reprocessing was lifted in the early 1980s, the previously favorable political and institutional environment for nuclear energy no longer existed, and the economic incentives for reprocessing had changed markedly. The principal factors precluding the resumption of commercial reprocessing in the United States were as follows:

• There was widespread cancellation of orders for new U.S. nuclear power plants, resulting in a precipitous decline in uranium concentrate prices from a peak of $44/lb U₃O₈ in mid-1979 to approximately $17/lb only 3 years later.

• There was greatly increased worldwide uranium ore reserves as a result of major discoveries in Australia in the late 1970s and in Canada in the early 1980s.

• The introduction of commercial gas centrifuge enrichment technology, completion of the Eurodiff gaseous diffusion plant, and the absence of new orders for U.S. nuclear power plants transformed the earlier forecast of a shortage of enrichment capacity to a condition of oversupply, resulting in major price reductions for enrichment services due to intense competition.

• The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 provided no economic incentive for HLW vitrifications as opposed to direct disposal of spent fuel. Indeed, the disposal of spent fuel in a geologic repository remained the Department of Energy (DOE) policy, in conformance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1978.

• The capital cost of breeder reactors relative to LWRs proved to be higher than had been projected in the early 1970s, and the unit cost of fabricating MOX LWR and liquid-metal reactor (LMR) fuel also proved higher than projected, exhibiting a steady increase with time. Large-scale deployment of commercial breeder reactors, once envisioned to begin as early as the 1980s, was delayed indefinitely. It now appears that the need for an LMR to forestall rising uranium costs may not occur until the second half of the next century, or later.

• The estimated cost to construct and operate commercial reprocessing plants increased due to several factors, including new regulations requiring containment of radioactive gases and solidification of the plutonium product, as well as the industry's recognition that fuel reprocessing should be treated as a high-risk venture, thereby increasing plant financing cost.

• There was a lack of a clear economic incentive for reprocessing and closure of the LWR fuel cycle as a result of the above events. Reprocessing and recycle of plutonium would have required reopening of the contentious GESMO

• 
  

• These formidable barriers to reprocessing led U.S. utilities to continue with a once-through fuel cycle and prompted reoptimization of LWR fuel management schemes to use longer and higher burn-up cycles. This reduced the fissile uranium and plutonium content of the spent fuel, further reducing the incentive to reprocess.

  Foreign interest in reprocessing continued, however, as those nations with limited economically recoverable domestic uranium resources saw reprocessing as an opportunity to reduce the increasing demand for uranium imports. In France, the 800-MTHM/yr UP3 reprocessing facility, as well as the 400-MTHM/yr expansion of UP2, were successfully designed, constructed, and operated. Construction of the 900-MTHM/yr Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) in the United Kingdom was completed in 1992, and the facility is currently in start-up. In Japan, the 800-MTHM/yr Rokkashomura plant is currently under construction and is scheduled for operation in 2000.

  RELATIVE ECONOMICS OF REPROCESSING VERSUS ONCE-THROUGH FUEL CYCLE

  A study of LWR fuel-cycle costs was recently performed by the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Their report, The Economics of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle (OECD/NEA, 1993), concluded that the levelized fuel cost for the once-through LWR fuel cycle is approximately 14% less than for the reprocessing cycle. Their analysis included a credit for both the uranium and the plutonium recovered through reprocessing.

  Those countries that chose to reprocess their nuclear fuel based their decision on a number of factors other than cost. With limited natural uranium resources, they have a strong interest in being self-sufficient in energy production. They also take a longer-term look than the "what are the profits in the next quarter" attitude of many of the decisions made in the United States. This led them to a strategy that included recovery and recycle of uranium and plutonium from spent fuel and vitrifying the HLW produced as a solid waste form for interim storage until a permanent waste repository is in operation.

  PRINCIPAL ISSUES IN DETERMINING WHETHER TO ADOPT REPROCESSING AND TRANSMUTATION AS A WASTE MANAGEMENT STRATEGY

  Recycling and transmuting TRUs and fission products requires reprocessing. While transmutation proponents claim that this can be done as economically as a once-through fuel cycle, the cost of reprocessing is a key factor in the cost of transmutation. Marshaling the management, technical, and financial resources to design, construct, and operate the reprocessing plants and specialty reactors to recycle and transmute TRUs and fission products is influenced by a number of major issues. While certain issues are largely political/institutional,

  they are nevertheless important, since they will influence the attitude of prospective lenders for these capital-intensive projects.

  The principal issues are

• the relative immaturity of certain aspects of nonaqueous (pyrochemical) reprocessing technology and of the advanced liquid-metal reactor (ALMR) technologies proposed to recycle and transmute the TRUs and fission products, and the magnitude of the development and demonstration program required before wide-scale implementation of a transmutation strategy can be implemented;

• likely growth in the required capital, operating and maintenance, and decommissioning costs for pyrochemical reprocessing and ALMR power plants as concept definition evolves;

• difficulty in obtaining a government financial commitment because of the expected high cost of transmutation technology development/implementation and the difficult-to-quantify benefits to public health and safety; and

• difficulty in attracting private capital due to the perceived high technical/economical/institutional risk of reprocessing/transmutation projects relative to alternative opportunities for investment capital, resulting a higher cost of capital due to the higher perceived risk.

These issues apply not only to centralized, large-scale reprocessing plants but also to smaller onsite reprocessing plants, transmutation reactors, and an integrated complex of reprocessing plants and transmutation reactors. Overcoming these barriers will be a formidable challenge. 

While pyroprocessing technology is being considered for reprocessing spent fuel that is associated with transmutation of TRUs, this technology is not sufficiently mature that reliable reprocessing-plant capital and operating cost estimates can be prepared. Moreover, it is by no means certain that pyroprocessing will prove more economical than conventional aqueous reprocessing, for which the technology is relatively mature. While Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) prefers pyroprocessing technology, the fuel-cycle costs developed by General Electric (GE) for the ALMR program are apparently based on the cost of plutonium and uranium recovery by extraction/transuranic extraction (PUREX/TRUEX) aqueous technology for reprocessing LWR spent fuel to start and refuel ALMRs. The GE estimates are based on PUREX aqueous technology, combined with new TRUEX technology for high-yield recovery of all TRUs. The capital costs developed in this section, and the operating costs developed in the section Reprocessing-Plant Operating Costs are therefore based on aqueous reprocessing technology.

Capital cost information was obtained from the open literature and private communications for three reprocessing plant projects: THORP (United Kingdom), UP3 (France), and Rokkashomura (Japan). UP3 is in operation, THORP is in the startup phase, and Rokkashomura is under construction. These three plants have annual throughputs in the range of 800 to 900 MTHM/yr, and each is based on aqueous PUREX technology.

The THORP reprocessing plant, which is located at the Sellafield site in the United Kingdom, is owned by British Nuclear Fuels, plc. THORP services include fuel receipt and interim storage; reprocessing (including conversion of uranium and plutonium to oxide); HLW vitrification and intermediate storage; intermediate-level waste encapsulation, interim storage, and disposal; and low-level waste (LLW) disposal. The reprocessing-plant capital and operating costs used in this appendix are based on this scope of services.

The reported capital cost of the THORP facility ranges from £2,600 million ($4,700 million in 1992 dollars) reported by Wilkinson (1987) to £4,000 million ($6,800 million) reported by K. Uematsu (private communication, 1992). The most credible cost is £2,850 million ($4,560 million), which was reported in the July 1993 report The Economic and Commercial Justification for THORP (British Nuclear Fuel, 1993). This cost excludes interest during construction since the plant was financed through up-front payments by THORP customers.

The average annual plant throughout scheduled for the initial 10 years of operation is 700 MTHM/yr, but British Nuclear Fuel estimates that the plant can process 900 MTHM/yr (1,200-MTHM/yr capacity, with operation at a 75% capacity factor). The OECD/NEA study, which based its reprocessing plant costs on the THORP facility, assumed a plant throughput of 900 MTHM/yr as well.

UP3 is the most recent addition to the large French reprocessing complex at La Hague. It reportedly has a design capacity (annual throughout) of 800 MTHM/yr. UP3 has been in operation since 1990, providing complete services that range from spent-fuel storage through HLW vitrification.

COGEMA, the owner/operator of UP3, reported a total capital cost of ff 50 billion for UP3 plus the 400-MTHM/yr expansion of UP2 to 800 MTHM/yr. If two-thirds of the cost is allocated to UP3 (based on the ratio of plant capacities), the resulting UP3 capital cost would be approximately $5,800 million. COGEMA also reported that the design and construction of UP3 required 25 million engineering man-hours and 56 million man-hours of field construction (Reprocessing News, 1990). While no information was provided on the cost of equipment,

materials, interest during construction, and other such costs, factoring in these costs based on historical experience results in a capital cost of $6,670 million to construct a comparable facility in the United States.

Japan Nuclear Fuel, Ltd. is currently constructing an 800-MTHM/yr reprocessing plant at the Rokkasho Village site. It is scheduled for operation in 2000. The technology is primarily French, with U.K. and German design input as well. This facility provides complete services, including HLW vitrification and storage for 8,200 waste canisters. The products are uranium and plutonium, with the plutonium diluted with uranium and converted to a 50/50 mixture of uranium/plutonium oxide.

Despite the lessons learned on the design and construction of the UP3 and THORP reprocessing plants, the constant dollar capital cost at Rokkashomura has not decreased significantly relative to these earlier plants. Reported capital costs for this facility range from $6,500 million (Chang, 1992) to $5,200 million (¥740 billion) (JGC, 1991). Because of the particularly stringent seismic design requirements in Japan, the cost of a facility of comparable capacity would probably be less in a region of lower seismicity.

Capital costs associated with a number of studies were also evaluated, the most important being the June 1993 "final revised draft" of the OECD/NEA study The Economics of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle (OECD/NEA, 1993). The committee considers this study particularly credible, because it is based on cost data from the recently completed THORP plant and includes input from COGEMA, the owner/operator of UP3. The capital costs reported in the OECD/NEA study are shown in Table J-1.

The total estimated cost of £3,297 ($5,370) million is 15% higher than the reported actual cost of THORP of £2,850 million ($4,560 million without interest during construction). The reason for this cost difference is not evident, but it could be associated with the higher cost of construction at the "grass roots" site assumed in the OECD/NEA study as compared with the existing site on which THORP is located.

In addition to the above capital-cost estimates for actual plants and the OECD/NEA study, a number of other studies of reprocessing plant economics have presented estimates over the past decade. Examples include the following:

• The 1990 study for a generic U.S. site estimated reprocessing-plant capital costs ranging from $2,725 million (government-owned plant) to $3,001 million (privately owned plant) for a reprocessing plant with an annual throughput of 1,500 MTHM/yr, 67% larger than the 900-MTHM/yr throughput of THORP (Gingold et al., 1991). These costs assumed a mature

  industry. The reprocessing plant involved aqueous PUREX technology together with new TRUEX technology for high-yield recovery of all TRUs.

• The ALMR fuel-cycle assessment (M.L. Thompson, private communication, 1990) developed a capital cost of $6,100 million for a 2,700-MTHM/yr reprocessing plant, three times the capacity of THORP. This cost also includes facilities for MOX fuel fabrication services. As in the Gingold et al. study, the reprocessing plant involved aqueous PUREX technology together with new TRUEX technology.

• McDonald (1993) presented a capital cost of $4,380 million for THORP (escalated from as-spent dollars to 1992 dollars).

• An OECD/NEA report (1989), derived unit reprocessing costs based on an analysis of the THORP plant. Reported reprocessing costs were $570/kgHM for a 5%/yr return on capital and $750/kgHM for a 10%/yr return. Depending on the assumptions used for plant economic lifetime, these figures would indicate a plant capital cost ranging from approximately $6,000 to $7,000 million (for a 15 to 30-year plant economic life).

The capital costs estimated in the first two of the above studies are substantially below those experienced in the construction and operation of actual plants. This is particularly difficult to rationalize considering that the study plants include new TRUEX separations and have annual throughputs two to three times higher than THORP, UP3, and Rokkashomura. Assuming that reprocessing plant capital costs are proportional to the 0.6 power of plant capacity, scaling the Gingold estimates to a 900-MTHM/yr capacity would result in a capital cost of $2,010 million for a government-owned facility and $2,210 million for a privately owned facility. Similarly, the GEl capital cost would decrease to $3,160 million for a 900-MTHM/yr plant, less the cost of the fuel fabrication facilities included in the GE estimate. These costs are only one-third to one-half of the costs reported for actual plants of 800 to 900–MTHM/yr capacity.

Even lower estimates of capital costs were presented earlier by the ALMR project (Salerno et al., 1989) for PUREX/TRUEX reprocessing plants designed for high-recovery yield of all TRUs from LWR spent fuel. Two cost estimates were presented, one with an annual throughput of 300 MTHM and a second with an annual throughput of 2,500 MTHM. Their estimates, escalated from 1989 to 1992 dollars, were $227 million and $4,250 million, respectively. Scaling the 300-MTHM/yr plant estimate to 900 MTHM/yr would result in a cost of $440 million, while scaling the 2,700-MTHM/yr plant estimate to 900 MTHM/yr would result in a cost of $2,200 million. These estimates are far below the reported capital costs of actual plants. More important, they indicate an inverse economy of scale with plant throughput, which has not been observed or predicted in other studies.

Based on the above information, the committee concludes that reported capital costs for actual contemporary plants currently provide the most reliable basis for estimating the cost of future plants. Estimated capital costs reported in recent U.S. studies appear inexplicably low.