Nuclear is Our Future

If you’ve heard of nuclear reprocessing, it’s probably been negative. Every nuclear technology carries its own trail of urban myths, and reprocessing is no exception.

• Nuclear reprocessing in the most general sense is the post-reactor use of spent fuel rods. Technically, a spent fuel rod can be reprocessed--its various materials separated from each other--but not recycled, which involves reusing some or all of those materials. We advocate recycling as well.
• Reprocessing plants in the 1950s-1970s were military-surplus facilities that were originally built to recover plutonium, not provide recycling services. A nuclear power plant does not run on separated plutonium, so a recycling facility need not separate plutonium from the still-unused uranium. Together, plutonium and uranium comprise 95%-97% of a spent fuel rod. France, Britain, Japan, and Russia all use the old military-surplus reprocessing technology, known as PUREX. All but Britain recycle; however, this recycling involves recombining the separated plutonium and uranium—completely removing any rationale to separate the plutonium! Unfortunately, it is not possible to convert these plants to a more modern version called UREX+ that does not separate plutonium.
• The United States does not reprocess. However, the UREX+ process was invented in the US, and any proposed reprocessing plant sited there would use UREX+, as PUREX has no economic or technical advantage. A third technology was developed during the 1980s which in principle is even better (pyroprocessing), and it has been demonstrated at laboratory scale—but it works only with advanced reactors. Pyroprocessing would separate heavy fuel from light waste only.
• Plutonium produced by nuclear power plants and extracted by PUREX facilities cannot be used in bombs; it is the wrong type of plutonium. All nations that have built plutonium-based nuclear weapons have gone far out of their way to produce one particular isotope, which is not possible in a nuclear power plant. Even though nuclear weapons states are ambiguous about whether the use of reactor-grade material is possible, the use of specialized, complicated, and expensive weapons-production reactors indicates that bomb designers know it is not possible. Furthermore, a 1962 test using substantially-higher-quality material (“fuel-grade” or intermediate between weapons-grade and reactor-grade) was a failure.
• Reuse of American spent fuel in Canadian reactors--a readily-available technology for delaying the need to make decisions on waste policy--can increase the overall fuel efficiency of the nuclear fuel cycle from 1% to 2% (this also includes material that is not used at all). Full recycling with advanced reactors, on the other hand, increases this efficiency to upwards of 99%. Due to the past 50 years of profligacy with nuclear fuel, advanced reactors operating only on the material already mined, used once at 1% efficiency, and labeled “nuclear waste” could provide 100% of US electricity for the next 500 years.
• Recycling to full use of the fuel greatly lessens the impact of waste that has already been produced. Most of the hazard in nuclear waste is not in the waste itself, but in plutonium and other semi-used fuel, called actinides. Separating nuclear waste--the atoms that have been split--from the fresh and semi-used components, then using those again, decreases the effective lifetime of the waste from 10,000 years to 300.
• Old PUREX plants were built either during the Cold War or the last months of World War II, and environmental impact was at best of secondary importance. Some, particularly the British and Soviet plants, discharged a mixture of nitric acid and already-split atoms directly into bodies of water. Japan’s newer plant does not do this at all; while it is certainly possible to build an environmentally-friendly PUREX facility, the PUREX process is the only one that produces liquid waste, and new facilities would not use the PUREX process.
• Ed Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists has given a figure of $316 billion as the cost of modern reprocessing and recycling. This is for a superficially similar system which in fact seems designed to be unable to commercially recover its costs (accelerator-driven transmutation). That analysis allows neither any prospect for recovery of this cost nor a comparison with the cost of other energy systems.