Last month Congress voted $50 million for the Energy Department to explore a new kind of reprocessing of nuclear power plant nuclear waste, one that would reuse a much larger fraction of the waste.

Sunday’s New York Times offered a feature on a kinda-new-but-not-really technology that is being explored to ease the big hole in the Yucca Mountain ground where, decades ago, nuclear power plants’ excess, unusable radioactive waste was decided to be input — the Yucca Mountain repository is now behind schedule and caught in the crossfire of politics and environmental debate.

Scientists and engineers originally thought it would be easy enough to deal with nuclear power plants’ radioactive waste: “sort out and save the small portion that was reusable, and put the rest in a hole in the ground.” As it turned out, though, reprocessing the waste was both expensive and risky — plutonium, the main material being scavenged, is a nuclear bomb fuel. And even if the Yucca Mountain repository opens, it will be far too small for the amount of waste that is being generated.

The proposed new kind of reprocessing, or processing spent fuel before it’s put in the repository, ambitiously would require “perfecting not only a new method of reprocessing, but also a new class of reactors to burn the salvaged material,” the NYT reported.

The new plan is for “electrometallurgical” reprocessing, in which giant electrodes are inserted in a mix of waste components, somewhat like electroplating.





Yet there are two advantageous factors, proponents have said: Yucca Mountain would be large enough to accommodate the waste that could not be recycled; and Yucca would be more easily opened, as the material not yet buried would generate less heat in the centuries to come.

The idea of reprocessing has been around for a number of decades already, as Energy Department official Robert Alvarez noted to the NYT, each time with a different rationale. Now it’s a waste-management rationale. But while some experts consider the new strategy as a time-buyer and a fail-safe w/r/t continued Yucca Mountain problems, others are skeptical that the new strategy, “which would involve separating the components of spent fuel and putting the salvaged material in reactors using higher-energy neutrons,” will work.

And concern over global warming and the increase in natural gas prices have given hope to nuclear advocates, who want new waste techniques as well as new reactors.

Phillip J. Finck, deputy associate director of the Argonne National Laboratory, an Energy Department complex, has said that by 2010, long before Yucca Mountain can open — you know, if it ever does — the United States would have more than the 70,000 metric tons of fuel that will fit there. He further argued that, without recycled fuel, the world will have to rely on finite reserves of uranium.

However, MIT physics professor and a former under secretary of energy Ernest J. Moniz has said that “if the world built enough reactors to provide energy without contributing to global warming, a new Yucca Mountain would be needed every three and a half years.” Moniz, along with others, has expressed caution regarding reprocessing, due to cost and time. A new generation of reactors would cost tens of billions of dollars and that it would be a long time before it was clear that reprocessed fuel was needed.

Reported the NYT:
The reprocessing strategy is subtle — to extract more use out of used fuel and to reduce the heat created by waste that cannot be recycled and still has to be buried. The heat is not a problem in the first few decades, when a repository could be left open for ventilation. The harder time is the next 1,500 years, when heat would be given off by longer-lived radioactive materials, mostly a category called actinides, and also the isotopes that are created as those actinides go through radioactive decay.

Reprocessing means chopping up nuclear fuel and separating the ingredients, uranium that was not used in the reactor and other elements that were created in the reactor and could be used as fuel, including plutonium and neptunium.

For a bevy of details on the topic, including the new plan, the salvaged materials, existing and required-new reactors and the risks, see the sources below.

…Because, as an editorial in the Patriot-News yesterday stated — (though we acknowledge the statement probably should be common sense…but we’ll commend them for stating the obvious for everyone else) — “If you are planning to store something as hazardous as highly radioactive nuclear spent fuel rods for literally tens of thousands of years, you better get it right.”

Resources

Scientists Try to Resolve Nuclear Problem With an Old Technology Made New Again
by Matthew L. Wald
The New York Times, Dec. 25, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/science/27nuke.html

Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste
by William H. Hannum, Gerald E. Marsh and George S. Stanford
Scientific American, December 2005
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=000D5560-D9B2-137C-99B283414B7F0000

Keep nuke waste on-site, senators urge
by Doug Abrahms
Reno Gazette-Journal, Dec. 15, 2005
http://news.rgj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051215/NEWS10/512150356/1016/NEWS

Nuclear waste bills introduced
by Steve Tetreault
Las Vegas Review-Journal, Dec. 15, 2005
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/Dec-15-Thu-2005/news/4806694.html

New nuclear waste legislation
Channel 3 KVBC (Las Vegas), Dec 14, 2005
http://www.kvbc.com/Global/story.asp?S=4246361&nav=15MV

Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS)
http://www.nirs.org/home.htm

U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board
http://www.nwtrb.gov/

Yucca Mountain Project
Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management
http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/ymp/index.shtml