The Bush Administration and Nuclear Waste Recycling

Reporting in the Environmental News Service, former senior energy advisor Robert Alvarez discussed briefings in 1996 conducted by the National Academy of Sciences concerning the feasibility of recycling nuclear fuel.

The purpose of the briefings was to explore the idea of recycling nuclear waste for reuse as fuel, thereby decreasing the amount of waste that would need to be buried and reducing the inherent risks such burial would impose through the millennial-long half-lives of such material.

As Mr. Alvarez reports, the conclusion from the Academy then was “unequivocal”: the idea was utterly impractical. At a cost of up to half-a-trillion dollars, it would still take 150 years for the process of “transmutation” of the dangerous radioactive material.

Another thorny problem is a by-product of the process – weapons-grade plutonium.

What seemed like a possibility has been studied and deemed, at least for now, unworkable. Thus, the ongoing policy since the Ford administration to ban the reprocessing of nuclear waste has remained in effect through five presidencies.

Enter George Bush and current energy secretary Samuel Bodman. Through a program called the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, or GNEP, the Bush administration has intensified lobbying efforts to revive nuclear recycling.

Alvarez reports that Bodman describes the GNEP recycling program as a “sweeping panacea”, with Bodman talking of limitless energy to emerging economies and the ability to “reduce the number of required… waste depositories to one for the remainder of this century” while enhancing “energy security” and “promoting non-proliferation”.

Sounds great. But as Bodeman talked Alvarez kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. It didn’t.

Gone was the realistic assessment of a decade ago, despite the fact that the daunting (to say the least) economic and technical challenges remain.

The Bush administration proposes $405 million for the GNEP program for fiscal year 2008; the US Congress will soon vote on the proposal.

Bush’s plan calls for the US and her “nuclear allies” to sell nuclear power reactors to developing nations as long as they promise not to use the technology to pursue weapons technology. The United States would take back the spent radioactive fuel rods for recycling. The really bad stuff (the weapons-grade plutonium by-product) will be “separated” and then “converted” into less threatening isotopes; a process that will happen in a “new generation of reactors”.

It all sounds good, just as it did at first in 1996, but Bush is well-known for obfuscation, and the science hasn’t changed since then.

From my reading of this issue, the plan fails to address the known problems of nuclear waste recycling. Given the history of programs like the “Clear Skies Initiative”, where it sounds like one thing but is really another, and the very serious matter of dealing with material that remains deadly for thousands or even millions of years requires a cold, scientifically sound assessment. And even then it entails a great deal of faith and optimism.

We are incapable of fully perceiving or understanding how what we do now will effect the world and its inhabitants in ten thousand or a million years.

We need to give it our best shot and insure that the issue remains divorced from politics as much as possible. Impossible, of course; but as an American citizen concerned for the environment, I am skeptical of the Bush administration’s true motivation and consideration of science.

In the meantime, Yucca Mountain, Nevada - the proposed sight for up to a millennia of nuclear waste storage - remains locked in legal and political battle. The recently elected Democratic congress is hostile to development of the site; senate majority leader Harry Reid is quoted as saying “Yucca Mountain is dead. It’ll never happen.”

For the time being all nuclear waste remains in shallow burial sites, mostly onsite at nuclear power or processing facilities; sometimes disposal methods don't even follow these relatively modest standards.

This is a good time for the average citizen, like you and me, to question authority. If you’re a US citizen, you can do that directly by asking your congressperson where they stand on the issue - and ask them to explain why.

The fact is, I believe, that nuclear power can and should not be dismissed out of hand in terms of global warming, energy use, and demand. We face extremely hard choices in the near future, and nuclear-generated energy is one of them.

Therefore, we need credible leadership from our political leaders, and policy based on the scientific and economic realities of the issues.

Hopefully that will come with the election of the next president.

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The Bush Administration and Nuclear Waste Recycling

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