Reprocessing Is Not the “Solution”
to the Nuclear Waste Problem
Nuclear Information and Resource Service
This program is central to the Bush administration’s efforts to jump-start the moribund nuclear power industry.
Statement of Mary Olson, NIRS Campaign to Stop Reprocessing. Director of NIRS southeast office:
“[George
W.] Bush’s misguided obsession with nuclear power has reached a
critical and dangerous juncture. The administration has been desperate
to find a nuclear waste solution in order to resuscitate the moribund
and unpopular nuclear power industry by moving forward quickly on the
scientifically-flawed Yucca Mountain waste dump in Nevada. Instead it
has found itself spinning its wheels in the mire of Yucca Mountain’s
geologic instability and the scandal of covering up these data. Faced
with an industry impatient to move its on-site waste, the
administration is now clutching at a new nuclear straw.”
“Its
latest scheme is reprocessing of irradiated commercial fuel, one of the
dirtiest and most proliferation-vulnerable processes in the nuclear
fuel chain. Abandoned in this country for more than 30 years, countries
where it has been done – including Britain, France and Russia – are now
reaping its hideous environmental legacy of contamination and disease.”
“The
price tag in dollars – as well as in health impacts – will be enormous
if this country is allowed to venture back down the reprocessing road.
The only U.S. commercial reprocessing site ever to operate – in West
Valley, New York – is projected to cost more than $5 billion to clean
up despite reprocessing only a fraction of the waste sent there between
1966 and 1972. Now Congress has awarded the U.S. Department of Energy
$50 million of our money to set this debacle in motion once again
although the totals are likely to reach the hundreds of billions of
dollars.”
“The
existing nuclear reactors around the globe are already sitting-duck
terrorist targets. Separating plutonium from nuclear power waste fuel –
as reprocessing does – simply sets up new and inviting opportunities
for terrorists to seize fissile, bomb-capable materials. Support
for a reprocessing program makes a mockery of statements coming out of
this administration that protecting the American people from terrorism
is paramount. Instead, it will put more Americans in harm’s way.”
Reprocessing Is Not the “Solution” to the Nuclear Waste Problem
The Radioactive Waste Burden
Splitting
atoms to make electricity has created an enormous problem: waste
containing 95% of the toxic radioactivity produced during the Atomic
Age. Nuclear weapons production, industrial activity, research and
medicine combined, create only 5% of this problem.
Every
nuclear power reactor annually generates 20-30 tons of high-level
nuclear waste since the irradiated fuel itself is the waste when
removed from the reactor core. Like fuel, the waste is a solid ceramic
pellet, stacked inside a thin metal tube or ‘cladding.’ In addition to
residual uranium, the waste is about 1% plutonium that is formed inside
the fuel rods by the reactor. The waste also contains about 5% highly
radioactive fission products like cesium, strontium and iodine, making
it millions of times more radioactive than “fresh” uranium fuel.
Unshielded, it delivers a lethal dose in seconds and will remain a
hazard for at least 12,000 human generations.
No End in Site
High-level
waste is piling up at reactor sites, stored outside of containment in
pools, and in large dry containers called casks. A growing security
threat, storage has been repeatedly approved to enable continued
reactor operation, and therefore continued nuclear waste production,
making risks greater. Now new reactors are being proposed, even though
there is no credible solution for the approximately 120,000 tons of
waste the first generation of reactors will produce.
The
U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has devoted nearly 20 years to the
development of a high-level dump at Yucca Mountain, a geologically
unstable, sacred site of the Western Shoshone people in Nevada. The
State of Nevada and the Shoshone Nation have vigorously opposed this
dump. Growing evidence substantiates that the Yucca site will fail in
the fundamental goal of a repository: to isolate radioactivity from our
environment. A second, industry-owned, alternative for centralizing the
waste on an Indian Reservation in Utah let by a consortium called
Private Fuel Storage (PFS) meeting enduring opposition from that state.
Both Yucca and PFS would trigger a “Mobile Chernobyl”–the largest
nuclear waste shipping campaign in history–with so many transport miles
that accidents are inevitable and security is an oxymoron.
Disregarding Hard-Won Wisdom
The
Bush / Cheney administration and its congressional allies are intent on
reversing over 30 years of extraordinarily rare common sense in nuclear
policy. In the 1970s it was decided that irradiated fuel and the
plutonium it contains, should be treated as waste–not as a resource.
This was in part due to the catastrophic failure after only one year of
operations at West Valley, New York–the only commercial reprocessing
site to operate in the U.S. West Valley’s reprocessing mess is still
not cleaned up – and the projected cost is over $5 billion.
Every
reprocessing site (France, UK, Russia, and soon Japan have the largest
sites) is an environmental catastrophe, with massive releases of
radioactivity to air, land and water; high worker radiation exposures;
and residues that are harder to handle than the terrible waste it
begins with. Reprocessing creates stockpiles of nuclear weapons-usable
plutonium, and is unviable without large taxpayer subsidies. President
Carter banned reprocessing as a nuclear non-proliferation measure;
while Reagan lifted the ban, no commercial interest has pursued this
expensive boondoggle, since it is not a profitable enterprise. Our
current president apparently intends for taxpayers to pay for the
relapse to reprocessing.
At
the end of 2005, Congress awarded $50 million to the U.S. Department of
Energy with instructions to make a new waste-reprocessing plan. DOE is
directed to use one of its sites–in 2006 it instructed to hold a
“competition” and the “winner,” to be announced in 2007, will get the
new reprocessing site. Congress specified (another promise?) that the
site should be opened by 2010.
Reprocessing Destabilizes Waste —
The
fuel rods are taken out of the assemblies, chopped up and then
dissolved in nitric acid. The resulting highly radioactive and caustic
stew is then processed to remove the plutonium and the uranium, leaving
the highly radioactive fission products in the liquid. While there are
methods to attempt to re-stabilize this material, there has been a
fundamental loss in the stability of the dry ceramic pellet in the
metal clad fuel rod.
Completely False Claims
1.
Reprocessing is NOT recycling. The formation of fission products in the
fuel rods makes high-level waste fundamentally different from the
uranium it came from. It is not possible to remake the original fuel
again from high-level waste – thus it is not a cycle.
2.
Reprocessing does not reduce radioactivity. No credible expert says
reprocessing reduces total radioactivity; some less informed sources
imply this. Reprocessing does change not the amount of radioactivity –
except to smear it around a large surface area, thereby diluting it
without any actual reduction of radioactivity.
3.
Reprocessing does not reduce waste volume; to the contrary, fuel pellet
volume is magnified by a factor of 100–100,000. The resulting
“dilution” allows the reclassification from “high-level,” to the
so-called “low-level” waste category, which is still deadly.
The “Midas-Touch” in Reverse
The
King Midas story of childhood teaches about the hazard of greed.
Radioactive waste contaminates everything it comes in contact with–but
instead of turning it all to gold, everything it comes in contact with
is turned to expensive, dangerous radioactive waste!
Kicking the Can…
A
stated goal of reprocessing is to use plutonium for reactor fuel. The
most common form is MOX (short for ‘mixed oxide’), made from plutonium
and uranium 238 (depleted uranium). While today’s reactors can use MOX
fuel, it is both riskier and more hazardous: MOX is harder to control,
and twice as deadly as uranium fuel if control is lost. MOX does
not “solve” the waste problem since reprocessing MOX fuel is even
harder than reprocessing uranium fuel, and not widely done. Princeton’s
Dr. Frank Von Hippel likens MOX use to “kicking the can down the
road”–not dealing with the waste problem at all.
Plutonium Destabilizes Our World
High-level
nuclear waste contains so much lethal radioactivity that the plutonium
inside the waste fuel rods is effectively safeguarded. Separating out
the plutonium makes it available for weapons use. For the United States
to reverse more than 30 years of policy against recovering civil
plutonium also reverses the moral authority with which the U.S. calls
on other nations to refrain from this activity. North Korea and Iran
are the most recent examples of countries ready to join the “nuclear
weapons club.” Reprocessing is a direct contradiction to US reprimands
of these nations for nuclear proliferation. The clear intention of the
Bush / Cheney team to return to full-scale production of new nuclear
weapons adds to this atomic hypocrisy.
Far
from putting the atomic genie back in the bottle, reprocessing creates
millions of gallons of highly radioactive, caustic, destabilized
high-level waste that history shows will leak; be evaporated; residues
put into glass that may, or may not retain the radioactivity for even a
generation; and now, under a new policy, be left forevermore on the
reprocessing site, mixed only with grout in a thin effort to keep it
from contaminating soil, water, food and our bodies. This is NO
SOLUTION.
–Mary Olson, January 2006
Nuclear Information and Resource Service
1424 16th St. NW # 404
Washington, DC 20036
202-328-0002
www.nirs.org
NIRS Southeast Office
PO Box 7586 Asheville, NC 28802
828-675-1792
nirs@main.nc.us
Nuclear Information and Resource Service
27 years of expertise on the nuclear fuel chain.
Linda Gunter, director of media relations
202.328.0002
lindag@nirs.org
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