Reprocessing Plans Tied to Yucca Delays, Scientist Tells Panel

Apr 14 - Las Vegas Review - Journal

The Bush administration's ambitious plans to reprocess nuclear waste may be tied in part to dissatisfaction over the lagging repository project at Yucca Mountain, a leading scientist and former Energy Department executive said Wednesday.

The administration is moving too fast to develop unproven technology through its Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, or GNEP, said Ernest Moniz, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"Right or wrong, the program being discussed has created an impression of being hellbent to reprocess current spent fuel, perhaps created by Yucca frustration," Moniz said in a presentation to a National Academies of Science panel.

Moniz, who was an energy undersecretary during the Clinton administration, said DOE risks getting locked into a course and GNEP could prove to be a wasteful "white elephant."

"Let's take at least 10 years to develop a robust laboratory- scale research program and in time we will decide what makes sense," he said. "There is no guarantee that a cycle of this kind will ever pass muster."

In a rebuttal, Vic Reis, a senior adviser to Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, dismissed the idea that Yucca Mountain was a factor in propelling GNEP.

"This isn't just about fixing Yucca Mountain," said Reis, who also served in the Clinton administration. "We have to do that anyway." The planned used fuel repository is about eight years behind schedule and faces possible legal and licensing obstacles ahead.

Rather, Reis said, the administration wants to seize an opportunity to partner with other nations that have needs for nuclear fuel and waste disposal and that share U.S. concerns about the spread of nuclear material that could be used to make bombs.

"This is not going to be an easy task," Reis said. "If we are just going to go after this in a business-as-usual, let's-do- research-and-development sense, I don't think we will get there."

Moniz, Reis and DOE adviser Burt Richter, a Nobel Prize laureate and physics professor at Stanford University, delivered GNEP presentations to the academies' nuclear and radiation studies board.

Their interplay illustrated the debate raging this spring among scientists, policy members, interest groups and members of Congress about nuclear fuel reprocessing.

The House and Senate are expected to vote later this year on whether to spend at least $250 million the Department of Energy has requested as a down payment on the GNEP effort.

The Department of Energy wants to have test fuel cycle facilities and advanced nuclear reactor pilot plants online by 2017, at a cost of about $13 billion. Further development could cost billions more.

GNEP envisions developing fuel recycling technology called Urex- Plus in partnership with France, Japan, Russia, China and the United Kingdom.

As far as disposal, Bush officials have advertised that reprocessing could shrink volumes of spent fuel and reduce its radiotoxicity to where Yucca Mountain easily could accommodate waste that would be generated by new nuclear plants that industry hopes to build.

Richter said the United States needs to revive its nuclear waste reprocessing efforts "and GNEP is a very good start.

"One of the things it is very important for critics to recognize is that the United States is no longer the big gorilla that controls what happens in the nuclear energy business," Richter said.

"I don't consider it to be an economic catastrophe for us to spend a few billion dollars to rebuild a totally decayed nuclear infrastructure in the United States," he said.