Reprocessing isn't the answer - by Richard L. Garwin

http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/op-eds/reprocessing-isnt-the-answer

Reprocessing isn't the answer
By Richard L. Garwin | 6 August 2009

Article Highlights
* With the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain seemingly dead, reprocessing again is being proffered as a way to deal with U.S. nuclear waste.
* But the reality is that reprocessing neither solves the waste problem nor reduces safety risks.
* Research should continue into next-generation reactors that can burn spent fuel, but until then, dry casks and repositories must be pursued.

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Some commercial interests argue that such spent nuclear fuel should be reprocessed (or "recycled," which is the industry's current term) into fresh fuel. They claim that this will greatly reduce the need for mined uranium and for underground repositories, and is, in any case, desirable--just as is all recycling of material such as paper, glass, aluminum, and steel. In reality, however, recycling spent nuclear fuel from U.S. reactors wouldn't solve any problems and would add additional cost and hazard.

In my congressional testimony, speeches, and published articles, I have provided technical details and abundant references to explain my opposition to reprocessing of LWR fuel back into fresh fuel as is practiced in France and a few other countries. France has decades of experience in technically successful reprocessing of its LWR spent fuel. It currently obtains one usable mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel element, a mixture of plutonium and uranium oxides, from every seven LWR spent fuel elements. But aside from the almost 1-percent plutonium in the spent fuel and the 94-percent uranium 238, the other 5 percent of mass (called "fission products") is removed and melted together with glass into a vitrified product that is encased in welded stainless steel canisters. These are stored at the French reprocessing plant at La Hague, awaiting the availability some decades hence of a mined geologic repository. In fact, for all the U.S. delays and roadblocks, it's far ahead of France in planning for a permanent repository.

In truth, reprocessing doesn't eliminate or even significantly reduce the need for a repository, as demonstrated by the authoritative presentations of Idaho National Laboratory Associate Director Phillip J. Finck, who has worked in the French program and is now in charge of a major portion of the U.S. government nuclear energy research program. According to Finck, Yucca Mountain could accommodate only about 10 percent more spent MOX fuel and vitrified fission products as produced at La Hague than it could normal spent fuel. This is because after four years in a reactor MOX fuel is much hotter than normal spent fuel, and so fewer spent MOX fuel elements can be accommodated in the same space as ordinary and cooler spent fuel (also called UOX, for its uranium-oxide content).

What's the long-term plan then? Well, there is no plan, but there are proposals. One of the more foolish was the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), advanced by the Bush administration and abandoned by Obama. It planned on building a U.S. reprocessing plant to recycle spent UOX into MOX fuel not for light water reactors, but for a new generation of fast reactors that would, if they were built, burn up the plutonium and the so-called higher actinides such as neptunium, americium, and curium in spent fuel. This would have had the advantage of reducing the long-persisting decay heat from spent MOX, which would make it simpler to store it in an underground repository.

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Reprocessing of LWR fuel also fails to save uranium, a common argument in favor of recycle. Although 1 percent of the fuel is plutonium and can be burned as MOX; recycling all LWR fuel, including reuse of uranium, would save at most 20 percent of the necessary supply of raw uranium ore. Analysis shows this isn't worth doing unless the cost of natural uranium rose to something like $750-$1,000 per kilogram. Its current price, however, is much lower, on the order of $70 per kilogram. Even at a price of $750 per kilogram, reprocessing would only be marginally preferable.

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