Recycling Nuclear Waste is Dangerous

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Recycling Nuclear Waste is Dangerous
May 2007 - As a senior energy adviser in the 
Clinton administration, I recall attending a briefing by the National 
Academy of Sciences in 1996 on the feasibility of recycling nuclear fuel. 
I'd been intrigued by the idea because of its promise to reduce the amount 
of waste that had to be buried, where it could conceivably seep into 
drinking water at some point in its multimillion-year-long half-lives. 
But then came the Academy's unequivocal conclusion - the idea was 
supremely impractical. It would cost up to $500 billion in 1996 dollars 
and take 150 years to accomplish the transmutation of dangerous long-lived 
radioactive toxins. 
President George W. Bush and his energy secretary, Samuel Bodman, have 
recently intensified their lobbying to revive nuclear recycling through a 
program they call the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, GNEP. 
As I listened to Bodman describe GNEP as a sweeping panacea  to supply 
virtually limitless energy to emerging economies, to "reduce the number of 
required ... waste depositories to one for the remainder of this century" 
and to "enhance energy security, while promoting non-proliferation"  I 
kept waiting, as I did just over a decade ago, for the caveats. 
But they never came, even though the idea remains as costly and 
technologically unfeasible as it was in the 1990s. 
Between 1993 and 1999, Robert Alvarez served in the Department of Energy 
as a senior policy advisor to the secretary of energy and deputy assistant 
secretary for national security and the environment. 
Members of Congress, who will soon vote on the President's request for 
$405 million for GNEP in fiscal year 2008, should recognize that GNEP has 
no chance in our lifetimes of brightening the prospects of finding safe 
ways of nuclear fuel disposal. 
In 1982, Congress enacted legislation requiring that nuclear power spent 
fuel be disposed of in ways that shield humans for at least hundreds of 
millennia. 
But today, a quarter-century later, prospects for long-term disposal are 
dimmer than ever. The government's nuclear waste disposal program is 
plagued by scandal, legal setbacks and congressional funding cuts. As a 
result, the schedule for the proposed Yucca Mountain disposal site in 
Nevada has slipped by two decades. 
Under the President's plan, the United States and its nuclear partners 
would sell power reactors to developing nations who agree not to pursue 
technologies that would aid nuclear weapons production, notably 
reprocessing and uranium enrichment. 
To sweeten the deal, the United States would take highly radioactive spent 
fuel rods to a recycling center in this country. 
Spent nuclear fuel rods at the Department of Energy's Savannah River 
National Laboratory in Aiken, South Carolina 
The foreign reactor wastes, along with spent fuel from the U.S. reactor 
fleet, would be reprocessed to reduce the amount that would go deep 
underground. Nuclear explosive materials, such as plutonium, would also be 
separated and converted to less troublesome isotopes in a new generation 
of reactors. 
In short, using the Bush administration's fuzzy nuclear math, more would 
become less. 
In fact, however, to reduce the amount of radioactive wastes slated for a 
deep geological repository, the majority of radioactive byproducts are 
planned to be stored in shallow burial. 
The site selected for the GNEP recycling center is likely to become a dump 
for the largest, lethal source of high-heat radioactivity in the United 
States and possibly the world. 
If placed in a crowded area, a few grams of these wastes would deliver 
lethal doses in a matter of seconds. Concentrations could be so large that 
if they were disposed of under current standards in shallow land burial as 
low-level wastes, shortly after separation they would have to be diluted 
to a volume as large as 500 million cubic meters, enough to fill 500 
Empire State Buildings. 
The plan would also threaten water supplies. For instance, it could result 
in levels of radioactive disposal thousands of times greater than now 
allowed at DOE's Savannah River site in South Carolina. 
The Bush administration lacks (or at least, has yet to disclose) credible 
plans for addressing any of the unprecedented health, safety and financial 
risks that GNEP would create. Unless the administration can furnish these 
details, the public should urge their legislators to zero out GNEP's 
budget. 
We are better off by investing in renewable energy and conservation, 
rather than pouring billions of dollars into the same old limitless energy 
schemes of our nuclear laboratories.
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