Aug 16 - U.S. Newswire

The political dust-up over radiation standards approved in the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) plans for a nuclear waste facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada could be toned down if the U.S. were to begin recycling spent nuclear fuel rods, according to scholars with the NCPA's E-Team project.

Congress wants to dispose of spent nuclear fuel rods at the Yucca Mountain facility and asked the EPA to set a standard for storage. The proposed standard is 15 millirems of radiation per year for the first 10,000 years; after that, the exposure standard jumps to 350 millirems per year, which EPA officials say is a typical level of radiation exposure from the sun, cosmic radiation and radon in buildings.

"Spent nuclear rods are not waste, and can be re-used," said NCPA Senior Fellow H. Sterling Burnett. "In fact, France, which gets 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, recycles its used fuel." E-Team Adjunct Scholar and past president of the American Nuclear Society Larry Foulke agrees. "While reprocessing spent rods will not preclude the need for the Yucca Mountain facility, it will reduce the need to build storage facilities in the future."

There are several benefits of reprocessing spent nuclear rods, which are often misleadingly referred to as nuclear waste, according to Dr. Foulke:

-- Reprocessing reduces the volume and radioactivity of spent nuclear fuel, but reprocessing or no reprocessing, the Yucca Mountain repository will still be necessary.

-- One kilogram of uranium contains as much energy as 38.5 tons of coal, but conventional reactors us only about 3 percent of that energy. If the U.S. joined France and Japan in recycling used fuel, existing and future spent rods would provide an almost unlimited supply of nuclear fuel (see http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba511/).

-- Recycling spent rods could wring more energy out of spent fuel and reduce volumes of waste material, thus extending the life of the Yucca Mountain repository.

"By recycling, nuclear waste sent to Yucca Mountain would be retrievable in 50 to 100 years. During that time, technology will develop," said Foulke.

Growing worldwide demand for electricity to maintain current living standards in developed countries and raise those in developing nations makes development of new energy sources essential, including power generation from spent nuclear fuel rods, according to Foulke. The Energy Information Administration forecasts a 50 percent rise in electricity demand by 2025, which along with rising prices for fossil fuels increases the need to recycle spent nuclear rods.

"Mining new fuel is among the most dangerous of nuclear operations and we currently aren't mining enough new fuel to meet demand. It's critical for the U.S. to be able to reprocess and recycle spent nuclear fuel to generate power," Dr. Burnett added.

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