Expert: Reprocessing often fails, too costly

People who are pinning their hopes on breeder reactors and reprocessing used fuel for dealing with the nation's nuclear waste dilemma need a reality check, a nonprofit energy policy research group asserted in a new study Thursday.

Reprocessing nuclear waste, like what has been attempted in France, Japan and elsewhere, often fails, is too costly, comes with nuclear weapons proliferation risks and doesn't eliminate the need for a repository to replace the one the Department of Energy had planned for Yucca Mountain.

That's according to Arjun Makhijani, president of the Maryland-based Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. His report recommends that the DOE's Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future not waste time on reprocessing and new breeder reactors because, he said, even advanced systems are costly and don't put a significant dent in preventing proliferation.

In his 50-page report, he noted the Obama administration's cancellation this year of the DOE's decades-long effort to study, license and eventually build a repository at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"It is only recently, with the failure of the Yucca Mountain program to provide a timely repository .... that reprocessing is now being promoted as a 'solution' to the problem of mounting quantities of spent fuel at more than five dozen commercial nuclear reactor sites in the United States," Makhijani wrote in the report, titled, "The Mythology and Messy Reality of Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing."

Describing the chemical extraction of uranium and energy-producing plutonium fuel for use in sodium-cooled breeder reactors as "recycling," Makhijani declared that "the French have not solved the waste problem."

Breeder reactors have been widely acclaimed because they generate new atom-splitting, or fissile, material at a faster rate than they use it. But the track record for breeder reactors is dismal and they create toxic waste streams. And the potentially deadly radioactive remnants still will require deep, geologic disposal, Makhijani said during a teleconference with reporters.

The largest breeder reactor in France operated at 8 percent capacity before it closed, and one built by Japanese engineers operated for a year before a sodium fire forced its shutdown in 1995. Others in Kazakhstan and Russia experienced multiple sodium fires, and the Kalkar breeder reactor in Germany never opened because of safety concerns after it had been constructed between 1972 and 1991.

Similarly, a U.S. prototype, the Clinch River Breeder Reactor in Tennessee, was canceled in 1983 after more than a decade of cost overruns and other setbacks including proliferation concerns.

"Indeed, reprocessing has not and cannot solve the problem of nuclear waste in the sense ... that all but a few percent of the used fuel can be 'recycled' efficiently and the remaining problem could be solved by storage for a few hundred years," the report states. "Nor have the proliferation, cost, and technology problems associated with the so-called 'recycling' been solved."

Converting most or all naturally occurring uranium "into fuel for new reactors will create large amounts of radioactive waste and likely involve huge additional expenses," Makhijani said.

By coincidence, his report was released on the same day that results of a poll conducted for the Las Vegas Review-Journal showed that 44 of the respondents in Nevada oppose opening the Yucca Mountain site for reprocessing nuclear waste instead of having it operate merely for disposing used nuclear fuel in a maze of tunnels.

Not far behind the opponents were 38 percent of the 625 Nevada voters interviewed by telephone this week who support reprocessing of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.

Brad Coker, managing director of the Washington, D.C. firm that conducted the survey, Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc., said polls from past years have consistently shown that 50 percent or more of Nevadans opposing putting nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.

The latest results, though, with 18 percent undecided, indicates some people are shifting on their views probably because "the economy has changed the way people think about this stuff."

They want to take a second look at Yucca Mountain because it could mean jobs and money for the state, Coker said. He said some Nevadans now might be thinking if reprocessing works then not as much waste would have to be entombed in the mountain.

"In any case I've yet to have a poll where a majority supported doing anything out there," Coker said.

A majority of Republican respondents, 60 percent, support the idea of reprocessing at Yucca Mountain while an equal percentage of Democrats oppose the idea.

"Republicans are probably saying, jobs, jobs, jobs and Democrats are probably more concerned about the environment," he said.

During Thursday's teleconference at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, nuclear physicist Frank von Hippel, a White House adviser in 1993 and 1994, said the most likely sites for disposing highly radioactive used reactor fuel should be the reactor sites themselves.

Von Hippel, who is a Princeton University professor and co-chairman of the International Panel on Fissile Materials, said he is intrigued "about the idea of deep bore hole disposal and putting the spent fuel down there. That could be done pretty much at any site."

Contact reporter Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308.