Spent fuel isn't nuclear waste

By Van Snyder

I received a "Nuclear News Bulletin" from nuclearmatters.com, in which they celebrated the re-opening of Three Mile Island and Palisades.

In response, I sent them this note:

Thanks for advocating for nuclear power, but….

A critical part of the nuclear power system is spent fuel processing. Spent fuel isn't nuclear waste. It's valuable 5%-used fuel. The unused-fuel part needs custody for 300,000 years. It's daft to pretend it can be hidden that long. The pyramids were plundered before 500 years! A far better idea is to turn it into electricity and fission products. Fission products are produced at the rate of about one tonne (1,000 kg) per GWe-year. 9.26% of fission products -- caesium and strontium -- need custody for 300 years. Half the rest are innocuous before thirty years, and the remainder aren't even radioactive. A 1,700 GWe all-electric all-nuclear American economy would produce less than 160 tonnes of caesium and strontium per year -- about the weight of one dime per American household -- which wouldn't quite fill nine cement-mixer trucks. We can handle that quite easily -- much more easily than trying to hide 34,000 tonnes of valuable 5%-used fuel every year.

The best way presently known to process spent fuel is the pyroelectric method developed at Argonne and Idaho National Laboratories, described by Charles E. Till and Yoon Il Chang in "Plentiful Energy." Although the Clinton administration destroyed what Nobel Physics Laureate Hans Bethe described as "the best research reactor ever built," the prototype fuel cycle facility remained, and has been in operation for forty years. This is proven technology but only at a small demonstration scale.

An important and necessary step is to build a pilot scale plant, 400-800 tonnes per year, to prove the technology at industrial scale. Argonne National Laboratory and the Landmark Foundation and Merrick & Company prepared a detailed engineering study and estimated the cost would be about 0.085 cents per kilowatt hour, comprising both capital amortization and operating costs. This is less than the 0.1 cents per kWh fee that the Nuclear Waste Act collected, and far less than the estimated costs at Japan's Rokkasho plant -- if it ever enters service.

An important obstacle to taking that step is that the Nuclear Waste Act explicitly forbids its funds from being used for reprocessing. That needs to be changed. The fund now stands at $42 billion. At the capital costs calculated by Argonne's study, those funds could build more than 100 pyroelectric processing plants with 400 tonne per year capacity, and nearly as many 800 tonne per year plants (because of economies of scale) -- far more than necessary even for a 1,700 GWe all-electric all-nuclear American economy. The pressing need now is to process 1,800 tonnes per year, and at least twice that amount more to deplete the present stock of spent fuel. That would require an investment of less than six billion dollars, but probably significantly less if done in stages to take advantages of lessons learned from first-of-a-kind construction and operation.

The next important step for long-term fuel security is to build breeder reactors, to extract all the energy immanent in uranium, instead of 0.6%. Contemporary reactors, and most proposed new designs, including those proposed by the myriad of companies offering small modular reactors (other than the inherently safe GE/Hitachi PRISM) cannot do that. The United States already has about 100,000 tonnes of spent fuel, and another 900,000 tonnes of depleted uranium -- that is, future fuel. And spent fuel is accumulating at the rate of about 1,800 tonnes per year. With breeder reactors, those million tonnes could power a 1,700 GWe all-electric all-nuclear American economy for more than 500 years without mining, milling, refining, enriching, or importing one new gram of uranium.

The contrarian assertion is that if we process spent fuel, other countries will develop nuclear weapons. It was the excuse given when development of PUREX processing was stopped decades ago. It was a convenient fiction, and it appears that Pakistan and North Korea and Iran were not on the distribution list for the memo. This objection is founded upon either ignorance or intentional deception: The mixture of plutonium isotopes in spent fuel is not suitable to make weapons, as explained in "Plentiful Energy." Nobody has deployed weapons made from spent nuclear power plant fuel because every other way to make them is easier and less expensive.

If you want more details, read "Plentiful Energy" and contact Dr. Chang at Argonne National Laboratory.

Please put your weight behind these efforts!