[House Hearing, 109 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
NUCLEAR FUEL REPROCESSING
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENERGY
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
JUNE 16, 2005
__________
Serial No. 109-18
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Science
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.house.gov/science
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______
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE
HON. SHERWOOD L. BOEHLERT, New York, Chairman
RALPH M. HALL, Texas BART GORDON, Tennessee
LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas JERRY F. COSTELLO, Illinois
CURT WELDON, Pennsylvania EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas
DANA ROHRABACHER, California LYNN C. WOOLSEY, California
KEN CALVERT, California DARLENE HOOLEY, Oregon
ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland MARK UDALL, Colorado
VERNON J. EHLERS, Michigan DAVID WU, Oregon
GIL GUTKNECHT, Minnesota MICHAEL M. HONDA, California
FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma BRAD MILLER, North Carolina
JUDY BIGGERT, Illinois LINCOLN DAVIS, Tennessee
WAYNE T. GILCHREST, Maryland RUSS CARNAHAN, Missouri
W. TODD AKIN, Missouri DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois
TIMOTHY V. JOHNSON, Illinois SHEILA JACKSON LEE, Texas
J. RANDY FORBES, Virginia BRAD SHERMAN, California
JO BONNER, Alabama BRIAN BAIRD, Washington
TOM FEENEY, Florida JIM MATHESON, Utah
BOB INGLIS, South Carolina JIM COSTA, California
DAVE G. REICHERT, Washington AL GREEN, Texas
MICHAEL E. SODREL, Indiana CHARLIE MELANCON, Louisiana
JOHN J.H. ``JOE'' SCHWARZ, Michigan DENNIS MOORE, Kansas
MICHAEL T. MCCAUL, Texas
VACANCY
VACANCY
------
Subcommittee on Energy
JUDY BIGGERT, Illinois, Chair
RALPH M. HALL, Texas MICHAEL M. HONDA, California
CURT WELDON, Pennsylvania LYNN C. WOOLSEY, California
ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland LINCOLN DAVIS, Tennessee
VERNON J. EHLERS, Michigan JERRY F. COSTELLO, Illinois
W. TODD AKIN, Missouri EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas
JO BONNER, Alabama DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois
BOB INGLIS, South Carolina JIM MATHESON, Utah
DAVE G. REICHERT, Washington SHEILA JACKSON LEE, Texas
MICHAEL E. SODREL, Indiana BRAD SHERMAN, California
JOHN J.H. ``JOE'' SCHWARZ, Michigan AL GREEN, Texas
VACANCY
SHERWOOD L. BOEHLERT, New York BART GORDON, Tennessee
KEVIN CARROLL Subcommittee Staff Director
DAHLIA SOKOLOV Republican Professional Staff Member
CHARLES COOKE Democratic Professional Staff Member
COLIN HUBBELL Staff Assistant
C O N T E N T S
June 16, 2005
Page
Witness List..................................................... 2
Hearing Charter.................................................. 3
Opening Statements
Statement by Representative Judy Biggert, Chairman, Subcommittee
on Energy, Committee on Science, U.S. House of Representatives. 8
Written Statement............................................ 9
Statement by Representative Michael M. Honda, Minority Ranking
Member, Subcommittee on Energy, Committee on Science, U.S.
House of Representatives....................................... 10
Written Statement............................................ 12
Prepared Statement by Representative Jerry F. Costello, Member,
Subcommittee on Energy, Committee on Science, U.S. House of
Representatives................................................ 13
Prepared Statement by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson,
Member, Subcommittee on Energy, Committee on Science, U.S.
House of Representatives....................................... 14
Witnesses:
Mr. Robert Shane Johnson, Acting Director, Office of Nuclear
Energy, Science, and Technology; Deputy Director for
Technology, U.S. Department of Energy
Oral Statement............................................... 14
Written Statement............................................ 16
Biography.................................................... 19
Mr. Matthew Bunn, Senior Research Associate, Project on Managing
the Atom, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of
Government
Oral Statement............................................... 19
Written Statement............................................ 22
Biography.................................................... 28
Dr. Roger Hagengruber, Director, Office for Policy, Security, and
Technology; Director, Institute for Public Policy; Professor of
Political Science, University of New Mexico
Oral Statement............................................... 29
Written Statement............................................ 31
Biography.................................................... 66
Dr. Phillip J. Finck, Deputy Associate Laboratory Director,
Applied Science and Technology and National Security, Argonne
National Laboratory
Oral Statement............................................... 66
Written Statement............................................ 68
Biography.................................................... 80
Financial Disclosure......................................... 81
Discussion....................................................... 82
Appendix: Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Mr. Robert Shane Johnson, Acting Director of the Office of
Nuclear Energy, Science, and Technology; Deputy Director for
Technology, U.S. Department of Energy.......................... 138
Mr. Matthew Bunn, Senior Research Associate, Project on Managing
the Atom, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of
Government..................................................... 142
Dr. Roger Hagengruber, Director, Office for Policy, Security, and
Technology; Director, Institute for Public Policy; Professor of
Political Science, University of New Mexico.................... 145
Dr. Phillip J. Finck, Deputy Associate Laboratory Director,
Applied Science and Technology and National Security, Argonne
National Laboratory............................................ 147
NUCLEAR FUEL REPROCESSING
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THURSDAY, JUNE 16, 2005
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Energy,
Committee on Science,
Washington, DC.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:05 a.m., in
Room 2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Judy
Biggert [Chairwoman of the Subcommittee] presiding.
hearing charter
SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENERGY
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing
thursday, june 16, 2005
10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
2318 rayburn house office building
1. Purpose
On Thursday, June 16, the Energy Subcommittee of the House
Committee on Science will hold a hearing to examine the status of
nuclear fuel reprocessing technologies in the United States.
Report language accompanying the House-passed H.R. 2419, the Energy
and Water Development Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2006, directs
the Department of Energy (DOE) to accelerate efforts to develop
reprocessing technologies and to recommend a specific technology by
September 2007.
The hearing will examine the status of reprocessing technologies
and the impact reprocessing would have on energy efficiency, nuclear
waste management and weapons proliferation.
2. Witnesses
Mr. Robert Shane Johnson is the Acting Director of the Office of
Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology and the Deputy Director for
Technology at the Department of Energy.
Dr. Phillip J. Finck is the Deputy Associate Laboratory Director,
Applied Science and Technology and National Security at Argonne
National Laboratory.
Dr. Roger Hagengruber serves at the University of New Mexico as
Director of the Office for Policy, Security and Technology; Director of
the Institute for Public Policy; and Professor of Political Science. He
also chairs the Nuclear Energy Study Group of the American Physical
Society, which issued a May 2005 report, Nuclear Power and
Proliferation Resistance: Securing Benefits, Limiting Risk.
Mr. Matthew Bunn is a Senior Research Associate in the Project on
Managing the Atom at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of
Government.
3. Overarching Questions
What are the advantages and disadvantages of nuclear
reprocessing in terms of efficiency of fuel use, disposal of
nuclear waste, and proliferation of nuclear weapons?
What is the current state of reprocessing
technologies? What criteria should be used to choose a
technology? What do we still need to know to make this
decision? Would choosing a reprocessing technology in 2007
limit future choices regarding other nuclear technologies, such
as reactor designs?
4. Brief Overview
Nuclear reactors generate about 20 percent of the
electricity used in the U.S. No new nuclear plants have been
ordered in the U.S. since 1973, but there is renewed interest
in nuclear energy both because it could reduce U.S. dependence
on foreign oil and because it produces no greenhouse gas
emissions.
One of the barriers to increased use of nuclear
energy is concern about nuclear waste. Every nuclear power
reactor produces approximately 20 tons of highly radioactive
nuclear waste every year. Today, that waste is stored on-site
at the nuclear reactors in water-filled cooling pools, or at
some sites, after sufficient cooling, in dry casks above
ground. About 50,000 metric tons of commercial spent fuel is
being stored at 73 sites in 33 states. A recent report issued
by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that this stored
waste could be vulnerable to terrorist attacks.
Under the current plan for long-term disposal of
nuclear waste, the waste from around the country would be moved
to a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which is
now scheduled to open around 2012. Yucca continues to be a
subject of controversy. But even if it opened and functioned as
planned, it would have only enough space to store the nuclear
waste the U.S. is expected to generate by about 2010.
Consequently, there is growing interest in finding
ways to reduce the quantity of nuclear waste. A number of other
nations, most notably France and Japan, ``reprocess'' their
nuclear waste. Reprocessing involves separating out the various
components of nuclear waste so that a portion of the waste can
be recycled and used again as nuclear fuel (instead of
disposing of all of it). In addition to reducing the quantity
of nuclear waste, reprocessing allows nuclear fuel to be used
more efficiently. With reprocessing, the same amount of nuclear
fuel can generate more electricity because some components of
it can be used as fuel more than once.
The greatest drawback of reprocessing is that current
reprocessing technologies produce weapons-grade plutonium
(which is one of the components of the spent fuel). Any
activity that increases the availability of plutonium increases
the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.
Because of proliferation concerns, the U.S. decided
in the 1970s not to engage in reprocessing. (The policy
decision was reversed the following decade, but the U.S. still
did not move toward reprocessing.) But the Department of Energy
(DOE) has continued to fund research and development (R&D) on
nuclear reprocessing technologies, including new technologies
that their proponents claim would reduce the risk of
proliferation from reprocessing.
The report accompanying H.R. 2419, the Energy and
Water Development Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2006,
which the House passed in May, directed DOE to focus research
in its Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative program on improving
nuclear reprocessing technologies. The report went on to state,
``The Department shall accelerate this research in order to
make a specific technology recommendation, not later than the
end of fiscal year 2007, to the President and Congress on a
particular reprocessing technology that should be implemented
in the United States. In addition, the Department shall prepare
an integrated spent fuel recycling plan for implementation
beginning in fiscal year 2007, including recommendation of an
advanced reprocessing technology and a competitive process to
select one or more sites to develop integrated spent fuel
recycling facilities.''
During Floor debate on H.R. 2419, the House defeated
an amendment that would have cut funding for research on
reprocessing. In arguing for the amendment, its sponsor, Mr.
Markey, explicitly raised the risks of weapons proliferation.
Specifically, the amendment would have cut funding for
reprocessing activities and interim storage programs by $15.5
million and shifted the funds to energy efficiency activities,
effectively repudiating the report language. The amendment was
defeated by a vote of 110-312.
But nuclear reprocessing remains controversial, even
within the scientific community. In May 2005, the American
Physical Society (APS) Panel on Public Affairs, issued a
report, Nuclear Power and Proliferation Resistance: Securing
Benefits, Limiting Risk. APS, which is the leading organization
of the Nation's physicists, is on record as strongly supporting
nuclear power. But the APS report takes the opposite tack of
the Appropriations report, stating, ``There is no urgent need
for the U.S. to initiate reprocessing or to develop additional
national repositories. DOE programs should be aligned
accordingly: shift the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative R&D away
from an objective of laying the basis for a near-term
reprocessing decision; increase support for proliferation-
resistance R&D and technical support for institutional measures
for the entire fuel cycle.''
Technological as well as policy questions remain
regarding reprocessing. It is not clear whether the new
reprocessing technologies that DOE is funding will be developed
sufficiently by 2007 to allow the U.S. to select a technology
to pursue. There is also debate about the extent to which new
technologies can truly reduce the risks of proliferation.
It is also unclear how selecting a reprocessing
technology might relate to other pending technology decisions
regarding nuclear energy. For example, the U.S. is in the midst
of developing new designs for nuclear reactors under DOE's
Generation IV program. Some of the potential new reactors would
produce types of nuclear waste that could not be reprocessed
using some of the technologies now being developed with DOE
funding.
Finally, the economics of nuclear reprocessing are
unclear. (The Committee intends to examine the economic
questions in a later hearing.) The U.S. nuclear industry has
not been interested in moving to reprocessing because today it
is cheaper to mine uranium and turn it into fresh fuel (through
``uranium enrichment'') than it is to reprocess and recycle
spent fuel.
5. Background
Current U.S. Practice: The open fuel cycle
Current U.S. nuclear technology uses what is called an ``open fuel
cycle,'' also known as a ``once-through cycle'' because the nuclear
fuel only goes through the reactor one time before disposal, leaving
most of the energy content of the uranium ore unused. In an open cycle,
the uranium is mined and processed, enriched, and packaged into fuel
rods, which are then loaded into the reactor. In the reactor, some of
the uranium atoms in the fuel undergo fission, or splitting, releasing
energy in the form of heat, which in turn is used to generate
electricity. Once the fission efficiency of the uranium fuel drops
below a certain level, the fuel rods are removed from the reactor as
spent fuel. Spent fuel contains 95 percent uranium by weight, one
percent plutonium, with the remaining four percent consisting of
fission products (Strontium, Cesium, Iodine, Technetium) and a class of
elements known as actinides (Neptunium, Americium and Curium).
Actinides are a class of radioactive metals that are major
contributors to the long-term radioactivity of nuclear waste. The
fission products and actinides have half-lives\1\ ranging from a few
days to millions of years. The ongoing radioactivity of the spent fuel
means that it still generates a lot of heat, so after removal, the
spent fuel rods are cooled in deep, water-filled pools. After
sufficient cooling, the fuel rods may be transferred to dry cask
storage pending ultimate disposal at a geologic waste repository such
as Yucca Mountain. Often they are just left in the cooling pools while
awaiting disposal.
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\1\ The ``half-life'' of a radioactive substance is the period of
time required for one-half of a given quantity of that substance (e.g.,
plutonium) to decay either to another isotope of the same element, or
to another element altogether. The substances with shorter half-lives
tend to generate more heat.
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A recent National Academy of Sciences study examined the
vulnerability of interim spent fuel storage to terrorist attack. After
a dispute with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Academy released
a declassified version of the study in April, titled Safety and
Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage.\2\ That report
concluded that the pools, under certain conditions, could be vulnerable
to attack, resulting in a large release of radioactivity, and
recommended steps to reduce the risk of such an incident. Dry cask
storage has inherent security advantages, according to the study, but
can be used only after the fuel has cooled for at least five years in a
water-filled pool.
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\2\ Board on Radioactive Waste Management, National Research
Council of the National Academies, Safety and Security of Commercial
Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage, April 2005
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If the licenses for most currently operational nuclear power plants
are extended to allow a 60-year operational lifetime as anticipated,
the U.S. will need to make a choice: increase the statutory storage
capacity of Yucca, build a second repository, close the fuel cycle, or
change the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to allow indefinite above-ground
dry storage until another solution is found. Some suggest that such a
decision is a necessary prerequisite to any expansion of the nuclear
industry in this country, in large part because the public needs to be
convinced that the U.S. has a long-term strategy for waste disposal. In
addition, by law, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must make a ``waste
confidence determination''--that the waste created can be safely
disposed of--in order to continue issuing facility licenses.
Closing the fuel cycle: Reprocessing and Recycling
The ``closed'' fuel cycle requires the same mining, processing and
fuel fabrication as the open cycle, prior to initial loading of the
fresh fuel rods into the reactor. However, in the closed cycle, the
cooled spent fuel is reprocessed, or separated into its individual
components. In this approach, some components of the spent fuel can be
used to fabricate new fuel for the reactor. The unusable waste is
either safely encased and disposed of as is (which means it is still
very hot and radioactive), or ``burned'' in a different type of reactor
to reduce the heat and radioactivity and then disposed of. In theory,
the fuel can go around this cycle many times until most of the energy
content is converted into electricity and only unusable products remain
for disposal.
Several countries around the world, including Japan, Russia and
France, currently reprocess their spent fuel with a process known as
PUREX, short for plutonium-uranium extraction, in which plutonium and
uranium streams are isolated from the remaining waste products. The
fission products and minor actinides are cooled and then vitrified, or
encased in glass, for long-term disposal. The uranium separated through
PUREX is impure and can't be fabricated into fuel without further
processing. As a result, the separated uranium is disposed of as low-
level waste. The plutonium, on the other hand, can be mixed with
freshly mined and enriched uranium to fabricate a mixed-oxide fuel
known as MOX, which is recycled into reactors to generate more power.
Plutonium can also be used to make weapons. Current practice in these
countries is to reuse the plutonium only once and then dispose of the
remaining waste rather than reprocessing and recycling a second time.
The Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative at DOE
The Administration's May 2001 National Energy Policy recommended
that the United States ``develop reprocessing and fuel treatment
technologies that are cleaner, more efficient, less waste-intensive,
and more proliferation-resistant.'' The Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative
(AFCI) in the Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology Office at DOE has
existed in various forms for many years, but adjusted its mission in
response to the President's call for a return to reprocessing. The
primary goals of the AFCI program are to: ``develop technologies that
will reduce the cost of geologic disposal of high-level waste from
spent nuclear fuel, enhancing the repository performance [and] develop
reactor fuel and fuel cycle technologies to support Generation IV
nuclear energy systems.''
Scientists working on AFCI are developing at least two reprocessing
technologies, UREX+ and pyroprocessing, while continuing research on a
new generation of technologies. The Department claims that both UREX+
and pyroprocessing have the potential to reduce U.S. nuclear waste
problems while effectively managing proliferation and safety concerns.
In UREX+, plutonium is never extracted in a pure stream--it remains
mixed with neptunium and americium, two long-lived actinides that may
act as proliferation deterrents by making the plutonium too toxic to
handle without special equipment. In pyroprocessing, also known as
``electro-metallurgical'' processing, spent fuel rods are mechanically
chopped, and the fuel is electrically separated into constituent
products. This isolates the uranium while leaving the plutonium and
other actinides mixed together. UREX+ is closer technologically to
PUREX and is better suited than pyroprocessing for reprocessing the
spent fuel from the current type of U.S. nuclear reactors, known as
light water reactors.
Optimizing the fuel cycle
Reprocessing is only one of several steps that could be used to
address nuclear waste problems. After actinides are separated from the
waste stream, they can be further processed--``burned''--through a
process called ``transmutation.'' Transmutation, which requires a
different type of nuclear reactor (such as a ``fast reactor''), can
generate electricity while reducing the toxicity of the actinides.
Transmutation reduces the temperature of the waste products
(radioactive materials are literally hot). This is significant because
disposal sites, such as Yucca Mountain, can be limited in terms of the
heat content they can accept as well as in terms of volume.
Transmutation technologies have not yet been developed for other
components of the nuclear waste stream.
Unless the U.S. also put into use transmutation technologies,
reprocessing might be of less use. Reprocessing could increase the
efficiency of nuclear fuel use and reduce the volume of waste, but
without transmutation, it could not reduce the temperature (``heat
load'') of the waste sufficiently to allow Yucca Mountain to store more
years of byproducts from nuclear generation.
In addition to pursuing reprocessing technologies, DOE has a
program to develop the next generation of nuclear plants, known as
Generation IV reactor designs that would be more energy efficient,
proliferation-resistant and safer than the current fleet of reactors.
Once DOE settles on a particular Generation IV design, it intends to
sponsor a demonstration project, known as the Next Generation Nuclear
Plant (NGNP) in Idaho. The NGNP also has the potential to make more
efficient use of recycled plutonium as well as the other actinides to
produce more electricity, possibly reducing the need for separate
transmutation facilities in the future. However, spent fuel from some
of the kinds of reactors being considered for the NGNP might not be
able to be reprocessed using UREX+.
6. Witness Questions
Mr. Johnson
What are the advantages and disadvantages of using
reprocessing to address efficiency of fuel use, waste
management and non-proliferation? How would you assess the
advantages and disadvantages, and how might the disadvantages
be mitigated?
What are the greatest technological hurdles in
developing and commercializing advanced reprocessing
technologies? Is it feasible for the government to select a
technology by 2007?
To what extent will the Department have to modify its
plans in order to comply with the report language accompanying
the House-passed fiscal year 2006 Energy and Water
Appropriations bill?
What reprocessing technologies are currently under
consideration? Is there one particular technology that is
considered more promising than others?
How should technology and policy decisions about
other components of the fuel cycle influence the selection of a
reprocessing technology?
Dr. Finck
What are the advantages and disadvantages of using
reprocessing to address efficiency of fuel use, waste
management and non-proliferation? How would you assess the
advantages and disadvantages, and how might the disadvantages
be mitigated?
What are the greatest technological hurdles in
developing and commercializing advanced reprocessing
technologies? Is it feasible for the government to select a
technology by 2007?
What reprocessing technologies currently are being
developed at Argonne or at other National Labs? What technical
questions must be answered?
What reprocessing technologies are still in the basic
research stage, what advantages might they offer, and what is
the estimated timeline for development of laboratory-scale
models?
How would you contrast what is being done
internationally with U.S. plans for reprocessing, recycling and
associated waste management? What countries recycle now? What
components of the waste fuel are or can be used to make new
reactor fuel?
Dr. Hagengruber
What are the advantages and disadvantages of using
reprocessing to address efficiency of fuel use, waste
management and non-proliferation? How would you assess the
advantages and disadvantages, and how might the disadvantages
be mitigated?
What are the greatest technological hurdles in
developing and commercializing advanced reprocessing
technologies? Is it feasible for the government to select a
technology by 2007?
What kinds of research and development should the
Department of Energy fund to ensure the proliferation
resistance of future reprocessing technologies?
Mr. Bunn
What are the advantages and disadvantages of using
reprocessing to address efficiency of fuel use, waste
management and non-proliferation? How would you assess the
advantages and disadvantages, and how might the disadvantages
be mitigated?
What are the greatest technological hurdles in
developing and commercializing advanced reprocessing
technologies? Is it feasible for the government to select a
technology by 2007?
How should technology and policy decisions about
other components of the fuel cycle influence the selection of a
reprocessing technology? From your perspective, is the
Department of Energy conducting the systems analysis required
to make sound near-term technology decisions and guide long-
term research and development?
Chairwoman Biggert. The hearing of the Subcommittee on
Energy of the Committee on Science will come to order.
Good morning to you all. I want to welcome everyone to this
hearing on nuclear fuel cycle and the potential for
reprocessing and recycling to help us better manage the
Nation's growing inventory of spent nuclear fuel.
To start, I want to quickly review our current situation to
put today's hearing into some context. Twenty years from now,
electricity demand in the United States is expected to increase
by 50 percent. If we are to meet this incredible growth in
demand without significantly increasing emissions of greenhouse
gases, we must maintain a diverse supply of electricity, and
nuclear power must be part of that mix. Nuclear energy is the
only carbon-free source of electricity that is currently
operating on a commercial scale nationwide. We know how to use
nuclear energy, and we know how to use it safely. But if we are
to continue to benefit from safe, emissions-free nuclear power
for at least 20 percent of our electricity, there is at least
one more issue that must be resolved: what do we do with the
growing inventories of spent nuclear fuel?
Yucca Mountain was to be the solution. However, its
intended opening slipped from 1998 to 2010, and now it is
likely to slip again to 2012 or 2014, according to the
Department of Energy. This failure to open Yucca Mountain as
scheduled or deal with the spent fuel accumulating at our
nuclear power plants in other ways may soon cost the Federal
Government up to $1 billion annually in legal liability and
interim storage costs. And when it does finally open, Yucca
Mountain will be full. It is limited by statute to store only
as much spent fuel as will have been created by 2010.
That Yucca Mountain, for all its intents and purposes,
already is full should come to no surprise. If you think of
nuclear fuel like a log, we currently burn only three percent
of that log at both ends and then pull it out of the fire to
bury it in a mountain. The bulk of what we call nuclear
``waste'' is actually nuclear ``fuel'' that still contains over
90 percent of its original energy content. Does that make any
sense? No, but that is our current policy, and it is just plain
wasteful. Unless we do something different or take another
approach, a second repository, or an expanded Yucca Mountain,
will be required. Politically, fiscally, and logistically, this
will be no easy task, and could preclude greater use of
emissions-free nuclear power.
For years now, scientists at DOE and a number of its
national laboratories have been working on ``new approaches''
to dealing with commercial spent nuclear fuel and solving the
long-term Yucca Mountain problem. More specifically, they have
developed technologies and processes to do something with spent
nuclear fuel besides bury it all in a mountain, like reprocess
and then recycle parts of it into new fuel for reactors.
There are many advantages to these technologies, which have
names like UREX+ and pyroprocessing. Let me just name a few.
First, they are proliferation resistant unlike the 30- to
40-year-old technologies already in use.
Second, they reduce the volume of our nuclear waste, which
could render another Yucca Mountain unnecessary.
And third, they could reduce the toxicity, the heat and
radioactivity, of the waste.
To fully realize these benefits and deal with the growing
inventory of spent fuel, the fiscal year 2006 Energy and Water
Appropriations bill, passed by the House last month, requires
the Department of Energy to develop an integrated spent fuel
recycling plan by the start of fiscal year 2007, and select a
reprocessing technology by the end of fiscal year 2007. I am
pleased, timing was perfect, that my colleague and author of
that bill, Chairman Hobson, has joined us here today.
These activities could be the key to better managing our
spent fuel. Reprocessing is just one step in the entire fuel
cycle, the cradle-to-grave path of nuclear fuel. However, it is
the first step to better managing our waste. We can learn
lessons from what the French and Japanese have done with
reprocessing. I know I did after visiting the French
reprocessing facilities with Chairman Hobson in early April. We
can continue to improve upon their technologies, processes, and
monitoring capabilities.
But we almost certainly won't achieve these improvements
without first doing a comprehensive systems analysis.
Technology decisions for reprocessing must take into account
technology and policy decisions for the entire fuel cycle. For
example, we need to know if the reprocessing technologies under
discussion here today are compatible with designs for the next
generation nuclear plant. Through modeling that incorporates
the relevant technical, economic, and policy considerations,
this ``systems approach'' will allow us to optimize the fuel
cell and make an informed decision about reprocessing.
Finally, how much could all of this cost? And that is a
good and important question, which is why it will be the
subject of another hearing at a later date.
This is a complex topic and one that involves many
interrelated technical and policy issues. Yet the technologies
and policies we will discuss today could help determine whether
nuclear energy becomes an even more significant source of
emissions-free electricity when we need it most in the years to
come.
And so to conclude, I want to thank the witnesses for
agreeing to share their knowledge and insight with us today. I
look forward to an open and spirited debate on this very
important subject.
[The prepared statement of Chairman Biggert follows:]
Prepared Statement of Chairman Judy Biggert
I want to welcome everyone to this hearing on the nuclear fuel
cycle, and the potential for reprocessing and recycling to help us
better manage the Nation's growing inventory of spent nuclear fuel.
To start, I want to quickly review our current situation to put
today's hearing into some context. Twenty years from now, electricity
demand in the United States is expected to increase by 50 percent. If
we are to meet this incredible growth in demand without significantly
increasing emissions of greenhouse gases, we must maintain a diverse
supply of electricity, and nuclear power must be part of that mix.
Nuclear energy is the only carbon-free source of electricity that is
currently operating on a commercial scale nation-wide. We know how to
use nuclear energy, and we know how to use it safely. But if we are to
continue to benefit from safe, emissions-free nuclear power for at
least 20 percent of our electricity, there is one more issue that must
be resolved--what we do with growing inventories of spent nuclear fuel.
Yucca Mountain was to be the solution. However, its intended
opening slipped from 1998 to 2010, and is now likely to slip again to
2012 or 2014 according to the Department of Energy (DOE). This failure
to open Yucca Mountain as scheduled--or deal with the spent fuel
accumulating at our nuclear power plants in other ways--may soon cost
the Federal Government up to $1 billion annually in legal liability and
interim storage costs. And when it does finally open, Yucca Mountain
will be full. It is limited by statute to store only as much spent fuel
as will have been created by 2010.
That Yucca Mountain, for all intents and purposes, already is full
should come as no surprise. If you think of nuclear fuel like a log, we
currently burn only three percent of that log at both ends, and then
pull it out of the fire to bury it in a mountain. The bulk of what we
call nuclear ``waste'' is actually nuclear ``fuel'' that still contains
over 90 percent of its original energy content. Does that make any
sense? No, but that's our current policy, and it's just plain wasteful.
Unless we do something different or take another approach, a second
repository, or an expanded Yucca Mountain, will be required.
Politically, fiscally, and logistically, this will be no easy task, and
could preclude greater use of emissions-free nuclear power.
For years now, scientists at DOE and a number of its national
laboratories have been working on ``new approaches'' to dealing with
commercial spent nuclear fuel and solving the long-term Yucca Mountain
problem. More specifically, they have developed technologies and
processes to do something with spent nuclear fuel besides bury it all
in a mountain, like reprocess and then recycle parts of it into new
fuel for reactors.
There are many advantages to these technologies, which have names
like UREX+ and pyroprocessing. Let me just name a few.
First. They are proliferation resistant unlike the 30- to 40-year-
old technologies already in use.
Second. They reduce the volume of our nuclear waste, which could
render another Yucca Mountain unnecessary.
Third. They also could reduce the toxicity--the heat and the
radioactivity--of the waste.
To fully realize these benefits and deal with the growing inventory
of spent fuel, the Fiscal Year 2006 Energy and Water Appropriations
bill, passed by the House last month, requires the DOE to develop an
integrated spent fuel recycling plan by the start of fiscal year 2007,
and select a reprocessing technology by the end of fiscal year 2007. I
am pleased that my colleague and the author of that bill, Chairman
Hobson, has joined us here today.
These activities could be the key to better managing our spent
fuel. Reprocessing is just one step in the entire fuel cycle--the
cradle-to-grave path of nuclear fuel. However, it is the first step to
better managing our waste. We can learn lessons from what the French
and the Japanese have done with reprocessing. I know I did after
visiting French reprocessing facilities with Chairman Hobson in early
April. We can continue to improve upon their technologies, processes,
and monitoring capabilities.
But we almost certainly won't achieve these improvements without
first doing a comprehensive systems analysis. Technology decisions for
reprocessing must take into account technology and policy decisions for
the entire fuel cycle. For example, we need to know if the reprocessing
technologies under discussion here today are compatible with designs
for the next generation nuclear plant (NGNP). Through modeling that
incorporates the relevant technical, economic, and policy
considerations, this ``systems approach'' will allow us to optimize the
fuel cycle and make an informed decision about reprocessing.
Finally, how much could all this cost? That's a good and important
question, which is why it will be the subject of another hearing at a
later date.
This is a complex topic, and one that involves many interrelated
technical and policy issues. Yet the technologies and policies we will
discuss today could help determine whether nuclear energy becomes and
even more significant source of emissions-free electricity when we need
it most in the years to come. And so to conclude, I want to thank the
witnesses for agreeing to share their knowledge and insight with us
today, and I look forward to an open and spirited debate on this very
important subject.
Chairwoman Biggert. And with that, I now recognize the--Mr.
Honda, the Ranking Minority Member of the Subcommittee, for an
opening statement.
Mr. Honda. Thank you, Madame Chairwoman, and thank you for
holding this very important hearing today.
From early on in the Nation's nuclear energy program, the
``plan'' to recycle, reprocess is the technical term, the fuel
used in the reactor, to reduce the amount of material defined
as waste and stretch the supply of available material needed
for the generation of electricity.
Indeed, scattered across America are facilities that were
built in anticipation of a ``closed'' back end fuel cycle, such
as those at West Valley, New York, Morris, Illinois, and
Barnwell, South Carolina.
These facilities never fulfilled their mission, however,
because of two principal factors.
First, the Carter Administration's decision to abandon the
reprocessing in the 1970s based on concerns raised about the
proliferation of nuclear weapons, and second, economics.
The Reagan Administration reversed course on the issue of
whether domestic reprocessing should serve as a tool in our
non-proliferation policy, but even then no reprocessing began.
Then, as now, it didn't make economic sense to develop a
domestic recycling capacity, partly because of the stagnation
that developed in the U.S. nuclear energy construction program.
Also, the so-called ``megatons to megawatts'' program that
takes Russian weapons-grade uranium and down-blends it to the
lower concentrations needed for nuclear power reactors has
helped to keep down the cost of reactor fuel, making
reprocessing uneconomical.
Whether we like it or not, it seems clear that this
Administration is leading us to a new era in the use of nuclear
energy for the production of electricity over the next several
decades.
This will create new demand for fuel, and the changing
conditions may well make the economics of reprocessing as a
means of supplying material for fuel more favorable.
Additionally, our nation is left with 50,000 metric tons of
commercial spent fuel currently being stored at 73 sites in 33
states, and each nuclear power reactor continues to produce 20
tons of highly radioactive waste every year.
Even if a waste repository at Yucca Mountain opens and
functions as planned, it would have only enough space to store
the nuclear waste the United States is expected to generate by
2010.
If reprocessing can facilitate either a reduction in
ultimate waste volumes or positively affect the challenge of
isolating the ultimate waste form from the accessible
environment, then perhaps we should assign some ``value'' to
those societal goods, further affecting the economic balance.
In short, we may need to take a long-term approach to this
issue and see if, indeed, it is not time to reexamine some
fundamental tenets of U.S. fuel cycle policy.
But in doing so, we must be sure to be mindful of the
threat any changes might pose in terms of nuclear
proliferation.
At a time when the United States is seeking to discourage
other nations from acquiring technologies that would produce
weapon-usable plutonium, we do not want to send the signal that
the United States is seeking to commercialize those very
technologies.
I look forward to learning more from the witnesses about
the state of the technology today, the economics surrounding
that technology, and its nonproliferation implications.
Thank you again, Madame Chairwoman, and I yield back the
balance of my time.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Honda follows:]
Prepared Statement of Representative Michael M. Honda
Madam Chairwoman, thank you for holding this important hearing
today.
From early on in the Nation's nuclear energy program, the ``plan''
was to recycle, reprocess is the technical term, the fuel used in the
reactor, to reduce the amount of material defined as waste and stretch
the supply of available material needed for the generation of
electricity.
Indeed, scattered across America are facilities that were built in
anticipation of a ``closed'' back end fuel cycle, such as those at West
Valley, NY, Morris, IL, and Barnwell, SC.
These facilities never fulfilled their mission, however, because of
two principal factors:
First, the Carter Administration's decision to abandon reprocessing
in the 1970's based on concerns raised about the proliferation of
nuclear weapons; and second, economics.
The Reagan Administration reversed course on the issue of whether
domestic reprocessing should serve as a tool in our non-proliferation
policy, but even then no reprocessing began.
Then, as now, it didn't make economic sense to develop a domestic
recycling capacity, partly because of the stagnation that developed in
the U.S. nuclear energy construction program.
Also, the so-called ``megatons to megawatts'' program that takes
Russian weapons-grade uranium and down-blends it to the lower
concentrations needed for nuclear power reactors has helped to keep
down the cost of reactor fuel, making reprocessing uneconomical.
Whether we like it or not, it seems clear that this Administration
is leading us to a new era in the use of nuclear energy for the
production of electricity over the next several decades.
This will create new demand for fuel, and the changing conditions
may well make the economics of reprocessing as a means of supplying
material for fuel more favorable.
Additionally, our nation is left with 50,000 metric tons of
commercial spent fuel currently being stored at 73 sites in 33 states,
and each nuclear power reactor continues to produce 20 tons of highly
radioactive waste every year.
Even if a waste repository at Yucca Mountain opens and functions as
planned, it would have only enough space to store the nuclear waste the
U.S. is expected to generate by about 2010.
If reprocessing can facilitate either a reduction in ultimate waste
volumes or positively affect the challenge of isolating the ultimate
waste form from the accessible environment, then perhaps we should
assign some ``value'' to those societal goods--further affecting the
economic balance.
In short, we may need to take a long-term approach to this issue
and see if indeed it is not time to re-examine some fundamental tenets
of U.S. fuel cycle policy.
But in doing so, we must be sure to be mindful of the threat any
changes might pose in terms of nuclear proliferation.
At a time when the United States is seeking to discourage other
nations from acquiring technologies that would produce weapon-usable
plutonium, we do not want to send the signal that the U.S. is seeking
to commercialize those very technologies.
I look forward to learning more from the witnesses about the state
of the technology today, the economics surrounding that technology, and
its non-proliferation implications.
Thank you again Madam Chairwoman, and I yield back the balance of
my time.
Chairwoman Biggert. Thank you.
At this time, I would like to extend a warm welcome to my
colleague from Ohio, Mr. Hobson, Chairman of the Energy and
Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee. And I would ask
unanimous consent that Chairman Hobson be allowed to sit in
with the Committee and participate in today's hearing. Without
objection, so ordered.
Chairman Hobson, would you like to say a few words?
Mr. Hobson. Well, it is hard to say a few words when you
are a Congressman, but I will try.
I want to thank the Chairwoman for allowing me to be here
with all of you today, and I am really here to listen for a few
moments. I do have to leave, but I want to demonstrate our
support together with this committee and my Committee for the
work that you are doing.
I think this is most important to the future of our
country. Recycling, or reprocessing, is something that I think
we need to do. Recently, we sent some material to France, and
it was recycled and returned to this country where it is going
to be burned in a nuclear power plant in this country. There
aren't any dire consequences of doing all of that. It is too
bad we couldn't do it here. This has a lot of economic benefit
to this country in the future, and what we are trying to do is
get the dialogue going and to get some real action.
I know that what we did in our bill is a little
controversial, but it is a way to kick the can over to try to
start people to talk about things and to get some new
processes, if necessary. This is being done in the rest of the
world. We need to relook at our policies that were determined
probably 50 years or so ago. But I want to also say that I am
very supportive of Yucca Mountain. I just don't want to get the
Yucca Mountain II any sooner than we have to, and this is a way
of not doing that.
But I want to thank you for the courage that you have taken
to step forward, Madame Chairwoman, to raise this issue and to
look at it from your Committee's standpoint, and I commend you
for that. And thank you for allowing me to be here.
Chairwoman Biggert. Thank you very much for coming today.
And let us see. Any additional opening statements submitted
by the Members may be added to the record.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Costello follows:]
Prepared Statement of Representative Jerry F. Costello
Good morning. I want to thank the witnesses for appearing before
our committee to examine the status of nuclear fuel reprocessing
technologies in the United States. Every nuclear power reactor produces
approximately 20 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste every year.
Today, the waste is stored on-site at the nuclear reactors in water-
filled cooling pools, or at some sites, after sufficient cooling, in
dry casks above ground. It is important to note that a recent report
issued by the National Academy of Sciences concluded this stored waste
could be vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Therefore, it is critical we
begin to review our current nuclear waste policies and access possible
policy options that may come before the Congress in the next few years.
Today's hearing marks the beginning of an important policy
discussion on reprocessing technologies and the impact it will have on
energy efficiency, nuclear waste management and weapons proliferation.
I believe we should carefully examine the advantages and disadvantages
of using reprocessing, and evaluate the policy options before making
any decisions. At the same time, we cannot back away or retract from
addressing critical national security concerns, such as nuclear waste
management and weapons proliferation just because nuclear reprocessing
is a controversial issue.
Within my home State of Illinois, the only nuclear engineering
department is at the University of Illinois. This is particularly
alarming because our state has 11 operating nuclear power reactors,
Argonne National Laboratory, where Dr. Phillip Finck is from, and other
nuclear facilities. Illinois residents have paid more than $2.4 billion
on the federal Nuclear Waste Fund. My state has a large stake in
nuclear power and technology and under-supported programs and
initiatives that could improve upon our nuclear capabilities are quite
troubling.
I am interested in hearing from our witnesses about the feasibility
of selecting a reprocessing technology by 2007. Over time, technology
will develop, interest will continue to grow, and economic
circumstances may change in ways that point clearly in one direction. I
believe we have an obligation to set aside sufficient funds so that we
are not passing unfunded obligations on to our children and
grandchildren, but not at the risk of implementing decisions
prematurely, thereby depriving future generations of what might turn
out to be better options developed later.
I welcome our witnesses and look forward to their testimony.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Johnson follows:]
Prepared Statement of Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson
Examining nuclear fuel reprocessing technologies is a vital step in
developing energy policy for the United States. Currently, this country
relies on nuclear reactors for roughly 20 percent of our total energy.
While nuclear energy provides less reliance on foreign oil and produces
no greenhouse gas emissions, there is the persistent concern about
nuclear waste. Today, this waste is stored on-site at the nuclear
reactors power facilities. This is not only a safety concern, but also
makes these facilities prime targets to terrorist attack. In order to
move towards the future, we must examine the best methods to deal with
this waste--whether it's through reprocessing or moving it to another
location. This hearing is a key step in beginning this dialogue for the
future.
Chairwoman Biggert. And with that, we will turn to our
witnesses.
And I thank you all for coming this morning. And first of
all, we have Mr. Shane Johnson, who is the Acting Director of
the Office of Nuclear Energy, Science, and Technology and the
Deputy Director for Technology at the Department of Energy.
Next is Mr. Matthew Bunn, who is a Senior Research Associate in
the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard University's John
F. Kennedy School of Government. Thank you for coming. And then
Dr. Roger Hagengruber. I am going to stumble over that all day
long. Hagengruber. He serves at the University of New Mexico as
Director of the Office for Policy, Security, and Technology,
Director of the Institute for Public Policy, and professor of
political science, and he chairs the Nuclear Energy Study Group
of the American Physical Society, which issued a May 2005
report: ``Nuclear Power and Proliferation Resistance: Securing
Benefits, Limiting Risks.'' And last, but not least, is Dr.
Phillip Finck, who is the Deputy Associate Laboratory Director,
Applied Science and Technology and National Security at Argonne
National Laboratory right in Illinois in my District. Welcome.
And welcome to you all.
As the witnesses know, spoken testimony will be limited to
five minutes each, after which the members will have five
minutes each to ask questions.
And we will begin with Mr. Johnson. You are recognized for
five minutes.
STATEMENT OF MR. ROBERT SHANE JOHNSON, ACTING DIRECTOR, OFFICE
OF NUCLEAR ENERGY, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY; DEPUTY DIRECTOR FOR
TECHNOLOGY, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
Mr. Johnson. Chairman Biggert, Congressman Honda, Members
of the Committee, and Chairman Hobson, I would like to thank
you for the opportunity to speak today on the Department of
Energy's efforts to develop and demonstrate advanced spent fuel
separations and recycling technologies.
I have submitted a written statement for the record, but
would like to provide a few summary remarks.
As you know, the President's National Energy Policy
recommended the expansion of nuclear energy in the United
States. To do this, we must also develop and apply advanced
technologies, including advanced proliferation resistance,
spent fuel treatment technologies, and next generation reactor
technologies.
These fuel treatment technologies are aimed at safely and
securely reducing the amount of commercial spent fuel requiring
disposal in a geologic repository. These technologies, in
combination with Generation IV reactors, hold the promise of
deferring, perhaps indefinitely, the need for a second
repository while reducing the inventory of civilian plutonium.
While the United States is a leader in the development of
these technologies, it is important to note that other nations
with domestic nuclear programs are also investigating similar
technologies.
The policy underpinnings of our Advanced Fuel Cycle
Initiative and our international cooperation is found in the
May 2001 National Energy Policy, which states that the United
States should consider technologies in collaboration with
international partners with highly-developed fuel cycles and a
record of close cooperation to develop fuel treatment
technologies that are cleaner, more efficient, less waste-
intensive, and more proliferation-resistant.
The technologies being developed in our Advanced Fuel Cycle
program present a significant advantage in proliferation
resistance over separation technologies currently being used in
other parts of the world and which were previously used in the
United States, namely the Plutonium-Uranium Extraction process,
or PUREX. PUREX is an aqueous separations process that was
deployed in the United States in the mid-1950s to separate
high-purity plutonium and uranium from fission products and
minor transuranic elements in irradiated nuclear fuels.
Over the last several years, our Advanced Fuel Cycle
program has made significant progress in the development of
advanced separation processes. We have successfully
demonstrated the feasibility of the Uranium Extraction Plus, or
UREX+, process at laboratory scale using actual spent nuclear
fuel and are planning integrated experiments at larger scale.
The UREX+ process is an advanced process that separates uranium
from spent nuclear fuel at a very high level of purity. Unlike
the PUREX process, UREX+ does not produce a separated plutonium
product and thus provides a considerable advantage in reducing
proliferation risks.
The Department is also investigating alternative
separations technology, called pyroprocessing. Pyroprocessing
technology employs high-temperature operations that use
selective reduction and oxidation steps in molten salts and
metals to recover nuclear materials.
The scale-up of these technologies from laboratory-scale to
engineering-scale is possible with minimal technical risk.
Using existing facilities, engineering-scale verification
experiments could be underway in five to six years with
possible commercial-scale operations possible in 10 to 12
years. Fuel fabrication experiments, as well as commercial-
scale operations, would lag the demonstration of the
separations technology by two to four years. However, modifying
existing structures presents numerous technical and regulatory
challenges.
An option to existing facilities is a greenfield approach
for the engineering-scale demonstration. If such an
engineering-scale operation were conducted in a new facility,
the demonstration experiments could begin in approximately nine
years, and it is anticipated that commercial--that would--that
the technology would be commercially available within about 20
years. Again, fuel fabrication would lag, the separations work
by about two to four years.
The Administration is currently examining recommendations
of the Congress contained in the U.S. House of Representatives
report accompanying the Energy and Water Development
Appropriations bill for fiscal year 2006 specifically that the
Department should inform a decision by fiscal year 2007 on a
preferred separations technology and develop an integrated
spent fuel management plan by that time that will ensure safe,
secure, and efficient deployment of nuclear power around the
globe.
We look forward to working closely with the Congress on
what is a key issue to spent nuclear fuel management today and
into the future.
Madame Chairman, this completes my statement, and I would
be pleased to answer any questions you might have. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Johnson follows:]
Prepared Statement of Robert Shane Johnson
Chairman Biggert, Ranking Member Honda, and Members of the
Committee, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to speak
before the Committee on Science, Subcommittee on Energy concerning
United States and international efforts to develop and demonstrate
advanced spent fuel separations and recycling technologies. Also, I
thank you for your leadership in the area of nuclear energy
technologies and for your interest in pursuing solutions to the
Nation's challenges with the disposition of commercial spent nuclear
fuel.
As you know, the President's 2001 National Energy Policy
recommended the expansion of nuclear energy in this country to reduce
our dependence on imported fuels needed for electricity generation and
to reduce emissions. To meet these challenges, we must develop and
apply advanced technologies, including advanced nuclear fuel cycles and
next generation reactor technologies, and development of advanced fuel
treatment technologies. These efforts are aimed at developing new
advanced proliferation-resistant spent fuel treatment technologies to
reduce the amount of commercial high level waste and spent fuel
requiring storage in a geologic repository. If successful, these
efforts could substantially improve repository capacity. In the longer-
term future, these technologies in combination with advanced nuclear
reactor technologies hold the promise of deferring, perhaps
indefinitely, the need for a second repository, while reducing the
inventory of civilian plutonium.
My testimony today focuses on U.S. efforts to develop new advanced
separations technologies technologies that are more efficient, less
waste intensive and more proliferation resistant--our progress in
developing these technologies, and additional work that is needed to
demonstrate commercial viability of these technologies. While the
United States is a leader in development of these technologies, it is
important to recognize that other nations (e.g., France, Japan, the
United Kingdom, China, India, and Russia) with domestic nuclear
programs are also investigating these technologies. Collaborations are
also underway between the United States and several of these countries.
A fundamental objective of U.S. collaborations is development of
advanced proliferation resistant fuel cycle technologies that will set
the standard for future international deployment of fuel cycle
facilities.
BACKGROUND
The policy underpinnings of the Department of Energy's Advanced
Fuel Cycle Initiative and its program for international cooperation
with other countries is contained in the May 2001 National Energy
Policy, which states that:
``. . .in the context of developing advanced nuclear fuel
cycles and next generation technologies for nuclear energy, the
United States should re-examine its policies to allow for
research, development and deployment of fuel conditioning
methods that reduce waste streams and enhance proliferation
resistance. In doing so, the United States will continue to
discourage the accumulation of separated plutonium,
worldwide.''
The policy further states that the United States should consider
technologies, in collaboration with international partners with highly-
developed fuel cycles and a record of close cooperation, to develop
fuel treatment technologies that are cleaner, more efficient, less
waste-intensive, and more proliferation-resistant.
Inherent in this recommendation is the recognition that regardless
of anticipated growth in nuclear generation, the Nation needs to
establish a permanent geological repository for spent nuclear fuel from
the operation of our existing commercial nuclear power plants. Further,
growth in nuclear energy in the United States using the current spent
fuel management approach would require construction of additional
geologic repositories to address spent nuclear fuel inventories
generated by the operation of additional nuclear power plants. However,
development of advanced separations technologies present a potential
alternative to building new repositories, optimizing the current
geologic repository, and enabling more efficient use of our nuclear
fuel resources.
As such, separations technologies are under development in the
United States and by other countries to reduce the volume, toxicity,
and fissile material content of spent nuclear fuel requiring the
disposal in a permanent geologic repository. These advanced
technologies are aimed at avoiding the proliferation issues associated
with separated plutonium while resulting in significantly smaller
quantities of high-level radioactive waste, enabling optimization of
the geological repository.
These new technologies present a significant advantage in
proliferation resistance over existing separations technologies being
used in other parts of the world today and which were used previously
in the United States--the Plutonium-Uranium Extraction (PURER)
technology. PURER is an aqueous separations process that was deployed
initially in the mid-1950s to recover high purity plutonium and uranium
from fission products and minor transuranic elements (elements heavier
than uranium). PURER has been deployed commercially in several
countries--principally France, the United Kingdom, Japan and Russia.
In the future, we believe that advanced separations technologies,
such as URanium EXtraction Plus (UREX+), could enable us to further
extend the useful life of any geologic repository and reduce the
radiotoxicity of the waste it contains such that it would decay to the
toxicity of natural uranium ore in less than 1,000 years--instead of
over 100,000 years as is the case with our current, untreated spent
nuclear fuel. This technology could also allow our nuclear plants to
use a far higher fraction of the energy contained in uranium ore,
potentially expanding the lifetime of the world's nuclear fuel
resources from around 100 years up to 1,000 years.
DEVELOPMENT OF INNOVATIVE SEPARATIONS TECHNOLOGIES
Over the last several years, the Department's Advanced Fuel Cycle
Initiative has made significant progress in the development of new fuel
treatment technologies, particularly as applied to the development of
the UREX+ technology, a technology that separates uranium from spent
nuclear fuel at a very high level of purity. This is important because
it demonstrates the feasibility of greatly reducing the mass of
material that would require disposal in a geologic repository. The
research has also successfully demonstrated the ability to separate the
short-term heat generating constituents of spent fuel and the
partitioning of the transuranic elements. Unlike the PUREX process, the
UREX+ process does not produce a separated plutonium product which
provides a considerable advantage in reducing proliferation risk.
Presently, the Department has demonstrated the feasibility of the
UREX+ process based on laboratory-scale tests using actual spent
nuclear fuel. While the results from our laboratory-scale tests coupled
with general industrial-scale experience could provide a high level of
confidence that the general direction being recommended is technically
feasible, integrated processing experiments carried out successfully at
a larger engineering-scale would be needed before there is sufficient
information to design and build new facilities or make needed major
modifications to existing facilities for commercial-scale operations.
While the UREX+ process has great potential to address the spent
fuel challenges associated with today's commercial light water
reactors, the Department has also been investigating an alternative
separations technology called pyroprocessing, which is more appropriate
for treating advanced fuels from fast reactors like those under
investigation in the Department's Generation IV reactor program that
may be developed and deployed in the long-term future. The
pyroprocessing technology employs high-temperature operations that use
selective reduction and oxidation in molten salts and metals to recover
nuclear materials. The pyrochemical processing technology is also
supportive of nonproliferation objectives in that the resulting
separated fuel material is adequate for use in fueling advanced fast-
neutron spectrum reactors but represents a significant reduction in
proliferation risk as the plutonium remains mixed with the other
transuranic elements and fission products. The largest scale
application of this technology is found at the Idaho National
Laboratory where engineering-scale treatment of sodium-bonded spent
nuclear fuel from the shutdown Experimental Breeder Reactor II has
provided several years of research and operations data. At maximum
capacity, this engineering-scale demonstration is capable of processing
up to three metric tons of spent nuclear fuel annually.
DEVELOPMENT OF ADVANCED FUEL CYCLE TECHNOLOGIES
The United States presently employs a once-through fuel cycle--that
is, the spent fuel is not recycled but rather discharged from the
reactor and maintained in interim storage at the reactor site pending
future shipment to a geologic repository. However, as discussed
previously, a number of countries operate a partially closed fuel cycle
in that the plutonium is removed from the spent fuel at a reprocessing
facility and is sent to a fuel fabrication facility to be blended with
fresh uranium and re-fabricated into mixed oxide (MOX) fuel pellets.
The pellets are placed into cladding material and bundled into fuel
assemblies for subsequent return to light water reactors capable of
using MOX as fuel. The other spent fuel constituents are immobilized in
glass for storage in a geologic repository. The Department is pursuing
an approach similar to this one used by other countries to create MOX
from surplus weapons grade plutonium.
The Department's Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative fuels development
includes proliferation-resistant fuels for light water reactors, fuels
that will enable transmutation of transuranics in Generation IV
reactors, and all fuels for the fast reactor group of Generation IV
reactors. The objective of these technologies is to avoid separating
plutonium in a pure form. The resultant mixed oxide fuel would contain
some or all of the minor actinides (neptunium, americium and curium)
contained in the spent fuel to enhance its proliferation resistance and
allow for further reductions in the volume and radiotoxicity of the
resulting high-level wastes. In each of these technologies, the benign
residual fission products would be sent to a geologic repository with
the exception of iodine-129 and strontium/cesium which would be
disposed by means other than a geologic repository. These approaches
are anticipated to increase the effective capacity of a geologic
repository by a factor of 50 to 100.
In fast reactor scenarios, actinides from spent fuel can be
processed to separate them from the bulk of the fission products and
uranium. The actinide stream can then be used to manufacture fuel for
use in fast reactors. Because the fuel is highly radioactive, the fuel
fabrication process must be conducted in shielded facilities,
conferring an additional degree of proliferation resistance.
Commercial scale-up of these spent fuel technologies can, based on
our recent analysis, be performed relatively rapidly, if existing
domestic facilities could be substantially modified and utilized. Using
existing facilities, engineering-scale verification experiments for a
chosen separation technology could be underway in five to six years and
commercial-scale operations could begin in ten to twelve years. Fuel
fabrication experiments and commercial-scale operations would lag the
demonstration of the separations technology by two to four years.
However, retrofitting existing structures to demonstrate commercial
viability of spent fuel treatment presents numerous technical and
regulatory challenges and may not be the most reasonable approach. For
example, a down-side to retrofitting existing structures would be the
current age of the structure and inherent inflexibilities such as the
introduction and testing of modern instrumentation for process control,
accountability and proliferation resistance.
An alternate scenario could be to build a ``greenfield''
engineering-scale demonstration facility that could provide assurance
of the commercial viability of spent fuel treatment and fuel
fabrication technologies. If both the engineering-scale and commercial-
scale operations were conducted in new facilities designed from the
ground up, engineering-scale experiments of a selected separations
process could begin in approximately nine years and commercial
operation, in about twenty. Again, fuel fabrication would lag by two to
four years.
CONCLUSION
Over the last few years, the Department has successfully
demonstrated the technical feasibility of advanced, proliferation-
resistant fuel cycle technologies. Engineering-scale demonstrations,
however, are needed to demonstrate with reasonable confidence the
commercial feasibility of these technologies. We look forward to
working closely with the Congress on the key issue of spent nuclear
fuel management today and in the future.
I would be pleased to answer any questions you may have.
Biography for Robert Shane Johnson
Shane Johnson is the Acting Director of DOE's Office of Nuclear
Energy, Science and Technology. He was appointed to this position in
May 2005, upon the resignation of the prior Director.
In this capacity, Mr. Johnson leads the Department's nuclear energy
enterprise, including nuclear technology research and development;
management of the Department's nuclear technology infrastructure; and
support to nuclear education in the United States. Mr. Johnson also
serves as the Lead Program Secretarial Officer for the Idaho National
Laboratory, the Department's lead laboratory for nuclear technology
research, development and demonstration.
Since 2000, Mr. Johnson has led the Office's nuclear technology
initiatives, serving a key leadership role in the initiation and
management of all of the Office's major research and development
initiatives, including the Generation IV Nuclear Energy Systems
Initiative, the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative, and the Nuclear
Hydrogen Initiative. In 2004, Mr. Johnson was promoted to the position
of Deputy Director for Technology, where his responsibilities also
include management of the Nuclear Power 2010 program and initiatives
aimed at strengthening university nuclear science and engineering
programs in the United States.
Mr. Johnson serves a central role in the Department's efforts to
reassert U.S. leadership in nuclear technology development. He led the
formation of the Generation IV International Forum (GIF), an
international collective of ten leading nations and the European
Union's Euratom, dedicated to developing advanced reactor and fuel
cycle technologies. He leads the Office's international cooperation
activities, including establishment of cooperative research agreements
with other countries and the development by the GIF of the Generation
IV technology roadmap, which resulted in the selection of six promising
reactor and fuel cycle technologies by the GIF for future development
efforts. Mr. Johnson currently serves as the acting chairman of the
GIF, pending election of a permanent chairman, and has served as the
U.S. representative to the policy committee since 2001.
Mr. Johnson has over twenty years of relevant management and
engineering experience within Government and industry. Prior to joining
DOE, Mr. Johnson was employed for five years by Duke Power Company and
Stoner Associates, Inc. where he was responsible for performing
engineering studies for nuclear, natural gas, and water utilities.
Mr. Johnson received his B.S. degree in Nuclear Engineering from
North Carolina State University and his M.S. degree in Mechanical
Engineering from Pennsylvania State University. He is a licensed
professional engineer.
Chairwoman Biggert. Thank you very much, Mr. Johnson.
And now Mr. Bunn, you are recognized for five minutes.
STATEMENT OF MR. MATTHEW BUNN, SENIOR RESEARCH ASSOCIATE,
PROJECT ON MANAGING THE ATOM, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, JOHN F.
KENNEDY SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT
Mr. Bunn. Madame Chairwoman and Members of the Committee,
it is an honor to be here today to discuss a subject that is
very important to the future of nuclear energy and efforts to
stem the spread of nuclear weapons, that is reprocessing of
spent nuclear fuel.
I support limited continued R&D on advanced fuel cycle
concepts that may offer promise for the future, but I believe a
near-term decision to reprocess U.S. commercial spent nuclear
fuel would be a serious mistake, with costs and risks far
outweighing its potential benefits.
Let me make seven points to support that view.
First, reprocessing, by itself, does not make any of the
nuclear waste go away. It simply separates--it is a chemical
process that separates the radioactive materials into different
components. Only if the added complexity of recycling or
transmutation follows reprocessing is there a potential, not
yet demonstrated, for destroying many of the long-lived
radioactive materials. Whatever course we choose, we will still
need nuclear waste repositories, such as Yucca Mountain.
As we heard, in the traditional process, known as PUREX,
the spent fuel is separated into plutonium, which is weapons-
usable, recovered uranium, and high-level waste. More advanced
processes, like UREX+ and pyroprocessing, attempt to address
some of the problems of PUREX, but whether they will do so
successfully remains to be seen.
Second, reprocessing using current technologies or
technologies available in the near-term would substantially
increase, not decrease, the costs of nuclear waste management.
In a recent Harvard study, we found, making assumptions quite
favorable to reprocessing, that the costs of reprocessing and
recycling would be about 80 percent higher than those of direct
disposal, and other studies, including government studies in
countries that are enthusiastic about reprocessing, such as
France and Japan, have come to similar conclusions.
The one mill per kilowatt-hour nuclear waste fee would no
longer be sufficient. Either the fee would have to be
substantially increased, or tens of billions of dollars in
taxpayer subsidies would have to be provided, or onerous
regulations would have to be imposed to force the industry to
build and operate the needed facilities itself.
The UREX+ technology now being researched adds a number of
complex separation steps to the traditional PUREX approach and
appears likely to further increase costs. Other processes might
some day reduce costs, but this remains to be demonstrated.
Official studies in recent years have predicted that the
advanced processing and transmutation technologies being
pursued would be more expensive than traditional approaches,
not less.
Third, reprocessing and recycling using the technologies
now commercially available means separating, fabricating, and
transporting tons of weapons-usable plutonium every year, when
even a few kilograms is enough for a bomb, inevitably raising
proliferation risks not posed by direct disposal. It is crucial
to understand that any state or group that could make a bomb
from weapon-grade plutonium would also be able to make a bomb
from the reactor-grade plutonium separated by reprocessing.
Moreover, a near-term U.S. return to reprocessing would
make it more difficult to achieve President Bush's goal of
convincing other countries not to build their own reprocessing
facilities. The new approaches, as Mr. Johnson mentioned, are
designed not to separate pure plutonium, but the plutonium-
bearing materials that would be separated in either the UREX+
process or by pyroprocessing would not be radioactive enough to
meet international standards for being very difficult to steal.
And if these technologies were widely deployed in the
developing world where most of the future growth in electricity
demand will be, that would contribute to the spread of
expertise, experience, and facilities that could be readily
turned to a nuclear weapons program.
Fourth, while unfortunately no complete life cycle
comparison of the safety and terrorism risks of reprocessing
and direct disposal has yet been done, it seems clear that
extensive processing of intensely radioactive fuel in the
presence of highly volatile chemicals presents more
opportunities for radioactive releases than simply leaving the
fuel untouched in large casks.
Fifth, the waste management benefits that might be derived
are quite limited. While the new technologies have, as their
goal, reducing both the volume of waste to be disposed and its
long-term hazard, the reality is that the projected
radiological doses from geologic repositories are already quite
low, and there are a variety of approaches to providing
additional disposal capacity at Yucca Mountain or elsewhere
without recycling, and these have not yet been adequately
examined.
Sixth, the potential energy benefits are also quite
limited. There is, indeed, quite a lot of energy in spent fuel,
but in today's market, it is like oil shale: there is a lot of
energy in it, but the cost of getting that energy out is much
more than that energy is worth. World resources of uranium
recoverable at prices far below those at which reprocessing
would make sense are sufficient to fuel a growing global
nuclear enterprise for many decades without recycling.
Seventh, and perhaps most important, there is no need to
rush to make this decision. We have today a proven,
commercially-available technology that will manage spent fuel
cheaply, safely, and securely for decades, and that is dry
casks, which utilities around the country are buying today. We
can, and should, allow time for technology to develop further
and for this decision to be made with care. Our generation does
have an obligation to set aside enough funds so that future
generations are not left with an unfunded obligation, but we
have no obligation to rush to judgment. Our grandchildren will
not thank us for implementing a technology today and depriving
them of options that might be better that might be developed
later.
Indeed, because the repository will remain open for 50 to
100 years, with spent fuel readily retrievable, proceeding
forward with direct disposal would leave all options open for
the future. It is a good thing that there is no need to rush,
because the technologies available are at a very early stage of
development. Only the most limited, as we heard, laboratory-
scale experiments have been completed to date, and serious
systems analysis of the costs of the different options, their
safety and terrorism resistance, their proliferation impacts,
prospects for licensing, and public acceptance have not yet
been done.
I recommend that we follow the bipartisan advice of the
National Commission on Energy Policy, which concluded that the
United States should continue its moratorium on reprocessing,
should expand interim spent fuel storage capacities, should
proceed with all deliberate speed toward opening a permanent
geologic waste repository, and should continue R&D on advanced
fuel cycle approaches.
At the same time, the U.S. Government should redouble its
efforts: to limit the spread of reprocessing and enrichment
technologies around the world, as a critical element of
President Bush's efforts to stem the spread of nuclear weapons;
to ensure that every nuclear warhead and every kilogram of both
plutonium and highly-enriched uranium worldwide is secure and
accounted for, as a key element of our efforts to prevent
nuclear terrorism; and to convince other countries to end the
accumulation of plutonium stockpiles while working to reduce
stockpiles of both plutonium and highly-enriched uranium around
the world.
Some day, approaches to reprocessing and recycling may be
developed that make sense. Research and development should
explore such possibilities, but we should not rush to judgment
now. If we want nuclear energy to grow enough to make a
significant contribution to meeting the climate change
challenge, that will require building support from governments,
publics, and utilities around the world, and doing that means
making nuclear energy as cheap, as simple, as safe, as
proliferation-resistant, and as terrorism-proof as possible.
Reprocessing using any of the technologies we have now or will
have in the near-term points in the wrong direction on every
count. And therefore, those who hope for a bright future for
nuclear energy ought to oppose near-term reprocessing of spent
nuclear fuel.
I would be happy to take your questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Bunn follows:]
Prepared Statement of Matthew Bunn
The Case Against a Near-Term Decision to Reprocess Spent Nuclear Fuel
in the United States
Madam Chairwoman and Members of the Committee: It is an honor to be
here today to discuss a subject that is very important to the future of
nuclear energy and efforts to stem the spread of nuclear weapons--
reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel.
I believe that, while research and development (R&D) on advanced
concepts that may offer promise for the future should continue, a near-
term decision to reprocess U.S. commercial spent nuclear fuel would be
a serious mistake, with costs and risks far outweighing its potential
benefits. Let me make seven points to support that view.
First, reprocessing by itself does not make any of the nuclear
waste go away. Whatever course we choose, we will still need a nuclear
waste repository such as Yucca Mountain.\1\ Reprocessing is simply a
chemical process that separates the radioactive materials in spent fuel
into different components. In the traditional process, known as PUREX,
reprocessing produces separated plutonium (which is weapons-usable),
recovered uranium, and high-level waste (containing all the other
transuranic elements and fission products). In the process,
intermediate and low-level wastes are also generated. More advanced
processes now being examined, such as UREX+ and pyroprocessing, attempt
to address some of the problems of the PUREX process, but whether they
will do so successfully remains to be seen. Once the spent fuel has
been reprocessed, the plutonium and uranium separated from the spent
fuel can in principle be recycled into new fuel; in the more advanced
processes, some other long-lived species would also be irradiated in
reactors (or accelerator-driven assemblies) to transmute them into
shorter-lived species.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ Some residents of Nevada seem to see reprocessing, incorrectly,
as an alternative to Yucca Mountain, but none of the strategies now
proposed would eliminate the need for a repository for highly toxic
nuclear waste. Indeed, it might surprise Nevadans to know that a stated
purpose of the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative is to make it possible to
bury the nuclear waste from a much larger quantity of electricity
generation in Yucca Mountain--albeit after transmutation that, it is
hoped, would reduce the long-term radioactive dangers posed by this
waste.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
More Expensive
Second, reprocessing and recycling using current or near-term
technologies would substantially increase the cost of nuclear waste
management, even if the cost of both uranium and geologic repositories
increase significantly. In a recent Harvard study, we concluded, even
making a number of assumptions that were quite favorable to
reprocessing, that shifting to reprocessing and recycling would
increase the costs of spent fuel management by more than 80% (after
taking account of appropriate credits or charges for recovered
plutonium and uranium from reprocessing).\2\ Reprocessing (at an
optimistic reprocessing price) would not become economic until uranium
reached a price of over $360 per kilogram--a price not likely to be
seen for many decades, if then. Government studies even in countries
such as France and Japan have reached similar conclusions.\3\ The UREX+
technology now being pursued adds a number of complex separation steps
to the traditional PUREX process, in order to separate important
radioactive isotopes for storage or transmutation,\4\ and there is
little doubt that reprocessing and transmutation using this process
would be even more expensive. Other processes might someday reduce the
costs, but this remains to be demonstrated, and a number of recent
official studies have estimated costs for reprocessing and
transmutation that are far higher than the costs of traditional
reprocessing and recycling, not lower.\5\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ See Matthew Bunn, Steve Fetter, John P. Holdren, and Bob van
der Zwaan, The Economics of Reprocessing vs. Direct Disposal of Spent
Nuclear Fuel (Cambridge, MA: Project on Managing the Atom, Belfer
Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of
Government, Harvard University, December 2003, available as of June 9,
2005 at http://bcsia.ksg.harvard.edu/BCSIA-content/
documents/repro-report.pdf). For quite similar conclusions, see John
Deutch and Ernest J. Moniz, co-chairs, The Future of Nuclear Power: An
Interdisciplinary MIT Study (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, 2003, available as of June 9, 2005 at http://web.mit.edu/
nuclearpower/). The MIT study presents the results of its fuel cycle
cost calculations differently, comparing the cost of a new low-enriched
uranium fuel element to those of a new plutonium fuel element,
assigning all the costs of reprocessing to the plutonium incorporated
in the new fuel element, rather than considering reprocessing as part
of the cost of spent fuel management and comparing the cost of managing
a fuel element by direct disposal to those of managing it by
reprocessing and recycling, as the Harvard study does. But these are
differences of presentation, which have no effect on the estimated per-
kilowatt-hour costs of the two fuel cycles; with the exception of a few
differences in assumptions (more favorable to reprocessing in the case
of the Harvard study), the conclusions of the two studies on the
economics are very similar.
\3\ France and Japan have been two of the countries most dedicated
to reprocessing spent nuclear fuel; in both countries, and in the U.K.,
reprocessing continues not because it is economic but because of the
inertia of past decisions and investments, the lack of available space
for multi-decade interim storage of spent fuel, and arguments that the
process will eventually have environmental and energy-security
benefits. The French study compared a scenario in which all of the low-
enriched uranium fuel produced in French reactors was reprocessed to a
hypothetical scenario in which reprocessing and recycling had never
been introduced, and found that not reprocessing would have saved tens
of billions of dollars compared to the all-reprocessing case, and would
have reduced total electricity generation costs by more than five
percent. See Jean-Michel Charpin, Benjamin Dessus, and Rene Pellat,
Economic Forecast Study of the Nuclear Power Option (Paris, France:
Office of the Prime Minister, July 2000, available as of December 16,
2003 at http://fire.pppl.gov/
eu-fr-fission-plan.pdf), Appendix 1.
In Japan, the official estimate is that reprocessing and recycling will
cost more than $100 billion over the next several decades. Studies
performed by both the government and the utilities a decade ago
concluded that direct disposal of spent fuel would be much less costly;
new analyses performed for an advisory committee to the Japan Atomic
Energy Commission in 2004 came to similar conclusions. See, for
example, Mark Hibbs, ``AEC Advisory Panel Clears Japan's Rokkashomura
for Reprocessing,'' Nuclear Fuel, November 8, 2004; and Mark Hibbs,
``Japan's Look at Long-Term Policy May Solve Rokkashomura Puzzle,''
Nuclear Fuel, July 19, 2004. The government's withholding of the data
on these past studies caused a scandal in Japan. In France, the
electric utility is state-owned, and so can be directed to pursue
reprocessing even if it is the more expensive approach; in Japan, the
utilities are seeking legislation that would subsidize the costs of
reprocessing with a government-imposed charge to all electricity users.
\4\ George F. Vandegrift et al., ``Designing and Demonstration of
the UREX+ Process Using Spent Nuclear Fuel,'' paper presented at
``ATALANTE 2004: Advances for Future Nuclear Fuel Cycles,'' Nimes,
France, June 21-24, 2004, available as of June 10, 2005 at http://
www.cmt.anl.gov/science-technology/processchem/Publications/
Atalante04.pdf.
\5\ See, for example, Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development, Nuclear Energy Agency, Accelerator-Driven Systems (ADS)
and Fast Reactors (FR) in Advanced Nuclear Fuel Cycles: A Comparative
Study (Paris, France: NEA, 2002, available as of December 16, 2003 at
http://www.nea.fr/html/ndd/reports/2002/nea3109-ads.pdf), p. 211 and p.
216; U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy, Generation IV
Roadmap: Report of the Fuel Cycle Crosscut Group (Washington, DC: DOE,
March 18, 2001, available as of July 25, 2003 at http://www.ne.doe.gov/
reports/GenIVRoadmapFCCG.pdf.), p. A2-6 and p. A2-8.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
To follow this course, either the current one mill/kilowatt-hour
nuclear waste fee would have to be substantially increased, or billions
of dollars in tax money would have to be used to subsidize the effort.
Since facilities required for reprocessing and transmutation would not
be economically attractive for private industry to build, the U.S.
Government would either have to build and operate these facilities
itself, give private industry large subsidies to do so, or impose
onerous regulations requiring private industry to do so with its own
funds. All of these options would represent dramatic government
intrusions into the nuclear fuel industry, and the implications of such
intrusions have not been appropriately examined. I am pleased that the
Subcommittee plans a later hearing with representatives from the
nuclear industry to discuss these economic and institutional issues.
Unnecessary proliferation risks
Third, traditional approaches to reprocessing and recycling pose
significant and unnecessary proliferation risks, and even proposed new
approaches are not as proliferation-resistant as they should be. It is
crucial to understand that any state or group that could make a bomb
from weapon-grade plutonium could make a bomb from the reactor-grade
plutonium separated by reprocessing.\6\ Despite the remarkable progress
of safeguards and security technology over the last few decades,
processing, fabricating, and transporting tons of weapons-usable
separated plutonium every year--when even a few kilograms is enough for
a bomb--inevitably raises greater risks than not doing so. The dangers
posed by these operations can be reduced with sufficient investment in
security and safeguards, but they cannot be reduced to zero, and these
additional risks are unnecessary.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\6\ For an authoritative unclassified discussion, see
Nonproliferation and Arms Control Assessment of Weapons-Usable Fissile
Material Storage and Excess Plutonium Disposition Alternatives, DOE/NN-
0007 (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Energy, January 1997), pp. 38-
39.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Indeed, contrary to the assertion in the Energy and Water
appropriations subcommittee report that plutonium reprocessing in other
countries poses little risk because the plutonium is immediately
recycled as fresh fuel--a conclusion that would not be correct even if
the underlying assertion were true--the fact is that reprocessing is
far outpacing the use of the resulting plutonium as fuel, with the
result that over 240 tons of separated, weapons-usable civilian
plutonium now exists in the world, a figure that will soon surpass the
amount of plutonium in all the world's nuclear weapons arsenals
combined. The British Royal Society, in a 1998 report, warned that even
in an advanced industrial state like the United Kingdom, the
possibility that plutonium stocks might be ``accessed for illicit
weapons production is of extreme concern.'' \7\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\7\ The Royal Society, Management of Separated Plutonium (London:
Royal Society, 1998, summary available at http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/
displaypagedoc.asp?id=11407 as of June 10, 2005.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Moreover, a near-term U.S. return to reprocessing could
significantly undermine broader U.S. nuclear nonproliferation policies.
President Bush has announced an effort to convince countries around the
world to forego reprocessing and enrichment capabilities of their own;
has continued the efforts of past administrations to convince other
states to avoid the further accumulation of separated plutonium,
because of the proliferation hazards it poses; and has continued to
press states in regions of proliferation concern not to reprocess
(including not only states such as North Korea and Iran, but also U.S.
allies such South Korea and Taiwan, both of which had secret nuclear
weapons programs closely associated with reprocessing efforts in the
past). A U.S. decision to move toward reprocessing itself would make it
more difficult to convince other states not to do the same.
Advocates argue that the more advanced approaches now being pursued
would be more proliferation-resistant. Technologies such as
pyroprocessing are undoubtedly better than PUREX in this respect. But
the plutonium-bearing materials that would be separated in either the
UREX+ process or by pyroprocessing would not be radioactive enough to
meet international standards for being ``self-protecting'' against
possible theft.\8\ Moreover, if these technologies were deployed widely
in the developing world, where most of the future growth in electricity
demand will be, this would contribute to potential proliferating states
building up expertise, real-world experience, and facilities that could
be readily turned to support a weapons program.\9\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\8\ See Jungmin Kang and Frank von Hippel, ``Limited Proliferation-
Resistance Benefits From Recycling Unseparated Transuranics and
Lanthanides From Light-Water Reactor Spent Fuel,'' Science & Global
Security, forthcoming.
\9\ For a discussion of the importance of these elements of
proliferation resistance, see Matthew Bunn, ``Proliferation Resistance
(and Terror-Resistance) of Nuclear Energy Systems,'' lecture for
``Nuclear Energy Economics and Policy Analysis,'' Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, April 12, 2004, available as of June 10, 2005
at http://bcsia.ksg.harvard.edu/BCSIA-content/documents/
prolif-resist-lecture04.pdf.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Proponents of reprocessing and recycling often argue that this
approach will provide a nonproliferation benefit, by consuming the
plutonium in spent fuel, which would otherwise turn geologic
repositories into potential plutonium mines in the long-term. But the
proliferation risk posed by spent fuel buried in a safeguarded
repository is already modest; if the world could be brought to a state
in which such repositories were the most significant remaining
proliferation risk, that would be cause for great celebration.
Moreover, this risk will be occurring a century or more from now, and
if there is one thing we know about the nuclear world a century hence,
it is that its shape and contours are highly uncertain. We should not
increase significant proliferation risks in the near-term in order to
reduce already small and highly uncertain proliferation risks in the
distant future.\10\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\10\ For a discussion, see John P. Holdren, ``Nonproliferation
Aspects of Geologic Repositories,'' presented at the ``International
Conference on Geologic Repositories,'' October 31-November 3, 1999,
Denver, Colorado; available as of June 10, 1995 at http://
bcsia.ksg.harvard.edu/
publication.cfm?program=CORE&ctype=presentation&item-id=1.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
As-yet-unexamined safety and terrorism risks
Fourth, reprocessing and recycling using technologies available in
the near-term would be likely to raise additional safety and terrorism
risks. Until Chernobyl, the world's worst nuclear accident had been the
explosion at the reprocessing plant at Khystym in 1957, and significant
accidents at both Russian and Japanese reprocessing plants occurred as
recently as the 1990s. No complete life-cycle study of the safety and
terrorism risks of reprocessing and recycling compared to those of
direct disposal has yet been done by disinterested parties. But it
seems clear that extensive processing of intensely radioactive spent
fuel using volatile chemicals presents more opportunities for release
of radionuclides than does leaving spent fuel untouched in thick metal
or concrete casks.
Limited waste management benefits
Fifth, the waste management benefits that might be derived from
reprocessing and transmutation are quite limited. Two such benefits are
usually claimed: decreasing the repository volume needed per kilowatt-
hour of electricity generated (potentially eliminating the need for a
second repository after Yucca Mountain); and greatly reducing the
radioactive dangers of the material to be disposed.
It is important to recognize that reprocessing and recycling as
currently practiced (with only one round of recycling the plutonium as
uranium-plutonium mixed oxide (MOX) fuel) does not have either of these
benefits. The size of a repository needed for a given amount of waste
is determined not by the volume of the waste but by its heat output.
Because of the build-up of heat-emitting higher actinides when
plutonium is recycled, the total heat output of the waste per kilowatt-
hour generated is actually higher--and therefore the needed
repositories larger and more expensive--with one round of reprocessing
and recycling than it is for direct disposal.\11\ And the estimated
long-term doses to humans and the environment from the repository are
not noticeably reduced.\12\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\11\ See, for example, Brian G. Chow and Gregory S. Jones, Managing
Wastes With and Without Plutonium Separation, Report P-8035 (Santa
Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1999).
\12\ This is because the uranium and plutonium separated by the
traditional PUREX process, not being very mobile in the geologic
environment, are not significant contributors in models of the long-
term radiation releases from a geologic repository.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newer approaches that might provide a substantial reduction in
radiotoxic hazards and in repository volume are complex, likely to be
expensive, and still in an early stage of development. Most important,
even if they achieved their goals, the benefits would not be large. The
projected long-term radioactive doses from a geologic repository are
already low. No credible study has yet been done comparing the risk of
increased doses in the near-term from the extensive processing and
operations required for reprocessing and transmutation to the reduction
in doses thousands to hundreds of thousands of years in the future that
might be achieved by this method.
With respect to reducing repository volume, while the Department of
Energy (DOE) has not yet performed any detailed study of the maximum
amount of spent fuel that could be emplaced at Yucca Mountain, there is
little doubt that even without reprocessing, the mountain could hold
far more than the current legislative limit. There are a variety of
approaches to providing additional capacity at Yucca Mountain or
elsewhere without recycling. Indeed, as a recent American Physical
Society report noted, it is possible that even if all existing reactors
receive license extensions allowing them to operate for 60 years, Yucca
Mountain will be able to hold all the spent fuel they will generate in
their lifetimes, without reprocessing.\13\ While proponents of
reprocessing and transmutation point to the likely difficulty of
licensing a second repository in the United States after Yucca
Mountain's capacity is filled, it is likely to be at least as difficult
to gain public acceptance and licenses for the facilities needed for
reprocessing and transmutation--particularly as such facilities will
likely pose more genuine hazards to their neighbors than would a
nuclear waste repository.\14\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\13\ Nuclear Energy Study Group, American Physical Society Panel on
Public Affairs, Nuclear Power and Proliferation Resistance: Securing
Benefits, Limiting Risk (Washington, D.C.: American Physical Society,
May 2005, available as of June 9, 2005 at http://www.aps.org/
public-affairs/proliferation-resistance), p. 17.
\14\ For an initial discussion of these points, see Bunn, Fetter,
Holdren, and van der Zwaan, The Economics of Reprocessing vs. Direct
Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel, pp. 64-66.
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Limited energy benefits
Sixth, the energy benefits of reprocessing and recycling would also
be limited. Additional energy can indeed be generated from the
plutonium and uranium in spent fuel. But in today's market, spent fuel
is like oil shale: getting the energy out of it costs far more than the
energy is worth. In the only approach to recycling that is commercially
practiced today--which involves a single round of recycling as MOX fuel
in existing light-water reactors--the amount of energy generated from
each ton of uranium mined is increased by less than 20 percent.\15\ In
principle, if, in the future, fast-neutron breeder reactors become
economic, so that the 99.3 percent of natural uranium that is U-238
could be turned to plutonium and burned, the amount of energy that
could be derived from each ton of uranium mined might be increased 50-
fold.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\15\ John Deutch and Ernest J. Moniz, co-chairs, The Future of
Nuclear Power: An Interdisciplinary MIT Study (Cambridge, MA:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003, available as of June 9,
2005 at http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/), p. 123. They present this
result as uranium consumption per kilowatt-hour being 15 percent less
for the recycling case; equivalently, if uranium consumption is fixed,
then electricity generation is 18 percent higher for the recycling
case.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
But there is no near-term need for this extension of the uranium
resource. World resources of uranium likely to be economically
recoverable in future decades at prices far below the price at which
reprocessing would be economic are sufficient to fuel a growing global
nuclear enterprise for many decades, relying on direct disposal without
recycling.\16\
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\16\ For discussion, see ``Appendix B: World Uranium Resources,''
in Bunn, Fetter, Holdren, and van der Zwaan, The Economics of
Reprocessing vs. Direct Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nor does reprocessing serve the goal of energy security, even for
countries such as Japan, which have very limited domestic energy
resources. If energy security means anything, it means that a country's
energy supplies will not be disrupted by events beyond that country's
control. Yet events completely out of the control of any individual
country--such as a theft of poorly guarded plutonium on the other side
of the world--could transform the politics of plutonium overnight and
make major planned programs virtually impossible to carry out. Japan's
experience following the scandal over BNFL's falsification of safety
data on MOX fuel, and following the accidents at Monju and Tokai, all
of which have delayed Japan's plutonium programs by many years, makes
this point clear. If anything, plutonium recycling is much more
vulnerable to external events than reliance on once-through use of
uranium, whose supplies are diverse, plentiful, and difficult to cut
off.
Premature to decide--and no need to rush
Seventh, there is no need to rush to make this decision in 2007, or
in fact any time in the next few decades. Dry storage casks offer the
option of storing spent fuel cheaply, safely, and securely for decades.
During that time, technology will develop; interest will accumulate on
fuel management funds set aside today, reducing the cost of whatever we
choose to do in the long run; political and economic circumstances may
change in ways that point clearly in one direction or the other; and
the radioactivity of the spent fuel will decay, making it cheaper to
process in the future, if need be. Our generation has an obligation to
set aside sufficient funds so that we are not passing unfunded
obligations on to our children and grandchildren, but it is not our
responsibility to make and implement decisions prematurely, thereby
depriving future generations of what might turn out to be better
options developed later. Indeed, because the repository will remain
open for 50-100 years, with the spent fuel readily retrievable, moving
forward with direct disposal will still leave all options open for
decades to come.
Similarly, there is no need to rush to set up new interim storage
sites on DOE or military sites, and no possibility of performing the
needed reviews and getting the needed licenses to do so by 2006, as the
Energy and Water appropriations subcommittee proposed.\17\ There is a
legitimate debate as to whether such interim spent fuel storage prior
to emplacement in a geologic repository should be centralized at one or
two sites, or whether in most cases the fuel should continue to be
stored at existing reactor sites. In any case, the government should
fulfill its obligations to the utilities by taking title to the fuel
and paying the cost of storage. At the same time, we should continue to
move toward opening a permanent geologic repository as quickly as we
responsibly can--in part because public acceptance of interim spent
fuel storage facilities is only likely to be forthcoming if the public
is convinced that they will not become permanent waste dumps.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\17\ See, for example, Allison Macfarlane, ``Don't Put Waste on
Military Bases,'' Boston Globe, June 4, 2005.
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Nor is there any need to rush on deciding whether a second nuclear
waste repository will be needed. While existing nuclear power plants
will have discharged enough fuel to fill the current legislated
capacity limit within a few years, the reality is that it will be
decades before sufficient fuel to fill Yucca Mountain has in fact been
emplaced. We can and should defer this decision, and take the time to
consider the options in detail. Congress should consider amending
current law and giving the Secretary of Energy another decade or more
before reporting on the need for a second repository.
Proponents of deciding quickly on reprocessing sometimes argue that
such decisions are necessary because no new nuclear reactors will be
purchased unless sufficient geologic repository capacity for all the
spent fuel they will generate throughout their lifetimes has already
been provided. I do not believe this is correct. I believe that if the
government is fulfilling its obligation to take title to spent fuel and
pay the costs of managing it, and clear progress is being made toward
opening and operating a nuclear waste repository, investors will have
sufficient confidence that they will not be saddled with unexpected
spent fuel obligations to move forward. By contrast, if the government
were seriously considering drastic changes in spent fuel management
approaches which might major increases in the nuclear waste fee,
investors might well wish to wait to see the outcome of those decisions
before investing in new nuclear plants.
It is a good thing there is no need to rush, as we simply do not
have the information that would be needed to make a decision on
reprocessing in 2007. The advanced reprocessing technologies now being
pursued are in a very early stage of development. As of a year ago,
UREX+ had been demonstrated on a total of one pin of real spent fuel,
in a small facility--and had not met all of its processing goals in
that test.\18\ Frankly, in my judgment there is little prospect that
further development of complex multi-stage aqueous separations
processes such as UREX+ will result in processes that will provide low
costs, proliferation resistance, and waste management benefits
sufficient to make them worth implementing in competition with direct
disposal. Pyroprocessing has been tried on a somewhat larger scale over
the years, but the process is designed for processing metals, and
significant development is still needed to be confident in industrial-
scale application to the oxide spent fuel from current reactors. Other,
longer-term processes might offer more promise, but too little is known
about them to know for sure.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\18\ Vandegrift et al., ``Designing and Demonstration of the UREX+
Process Using Spent Nuclear Fuel.''
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So far, we do not have a credible life-cycle analysis of the cost
of a reprocessing and transmutation system compared to that of direct
disposal; DOE has yet to do any detailed estimate of how much spent
fuel can be placed in Yucca Mountain, and of non-reprocessing
approaches to extending that capacity; we do not have a realistic
evaluation of the impact of a reprocessing and transmutation on the
existing nuclear fuel industry; we do not have a serious evaluation of
the licensing and public acceptance issues facing development and
deployment of such a system; we do not have any serious assessment of
the safety and terrorism risks of a reprocessing and transmutation
system, compared to those of direct disposal; and we do not yet have
assessments of the proliferation implications of the proposed systems
that are detailed enough to support responsible decision-making. In
short, now is the time for continued research and development, and
additional systems analysis, not the time for committing to processing
using any particular technology.
Recommendations
For the reasons just outlined, I recommend that we follow the
advice of the bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy, which
reflected a broad spectrum of opinion on energy matters generally and
on nuclear energy in particular, and recommended that the United States
should:
(1) ``continue indefinitely the U.S. moratoria on commercial
reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel and construction of
commercial breeder reactors;''
(2) establish expanded interim spent fuel storage capacities
``as a complement and interim back-up'' to Yucca Mountain;
(3) proceed ``with all deliberate speed'' toward licensing and
operating a permanent geologic waste repository; and
(4) continue research and development on advanced fuel cycle
approaches that might improve nuclear waste management and
uranium utilization, without the huge disadvantages of
traditional approaches to reprocessing.\19\
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\19\ National Commission on Energy Policy, Ending the Energy
Stalemate: A Bipartisan Strategy to Meet America's Energy Challenges
(Washington, D.C.: National Commission on Energy Policy, December 2004,
available as of June 9, 2005, at http://www.energycommission.org/
ewebeditpro/items/O82F4682.pdf), pp. 60-61.
At the same time, the U.S. Government should redouble its efforts
to: (a) limit the spread of reprocessing and enrichment technologies,
as a critical element of a strengthened nonproliferation effort; (b)
ensure that every nuclear warhead and every kilogram of separated
plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU) worldwide are secure and
accounted for, as the most critical step to prevent nuclear
terrorism;\20\ and (c) convince other countries to end the accumulation
of plutonium stockpiles, and work to reduce stockpiles of both
plutonium and HEU around the world. The Bush Administration should, in
particular, resume the effort to negotiate a 20-year U.S.-Russian
moratorium on separation of plutonium that was almost completed at the
end of the Clinton Administration.
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\20\ For detailed recommendations, see Matthew Bunn and Anthony
Wier, Securing the Bomb 2005: The New Global Imperatives (Cambridge,
Mass., and Washington, D.C.: Project on Managing the Atom, Harvard
University, and Nuclear Threat Initiative, May 2005, available as of
June 10, 2005 at http://www.nti.org/cnwm).
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Similar recommendations have been made in the MIT study on the
future of nuclear energy,\21\ and in the American Physical Society
study of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons proliferation.\22\
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\21\ John Deutch and Ernest J. Moniz, co-chairs, The Future of
Nuclear Power: An Interdisciplinary MIT Study (Cambridge, MA:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003, available as of June 9,
2005 at http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/).
\22\ Nuclear Energy Study Group, American Physical Society Panel on
Public Affairs, Nuclear Power and Proliferation Resistance: Securing
Benefits, Limiting Risk (Washington, D.C.: American Physical Society,
May 2005, available as of June 9, 2005 at http://www.aps.org/
public-affairs/proliferation-resistance).
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It remains possible that someday approaches to reprocessing and
recycling will be developed that make security, economic, political,
and environmental sense. Research and development should explore such
possibilities. Continued investment in R&D on advanced fuel cycle
technologies is justified, in part to ensure that the United States
will have the technological expertise and credibility to play a leading
role in limiting the proliferation risks of the fuel cycle around the
world. But the leverage of these technologies in meeting the most
serious energy challenges of the 21st century is likely to be somewhat
limited in comparison to the promise of other potential future energy
technologies, and the emphasis that nuclear fuel cycle R&D should
receive in the overall energy R&D portfolio should reflect that.
The global nuclear energy system would have to grow substantially
if nuclear energy was to make a substantial contribution to meeting the
world's 21st century needs for carbon-free energy. Building the support
from governments, utilities, and publics needed to achieve that kind of
growth will require making nuclear energy as cheap, as simple, as safe,
as proliferation-resistant, and as terrorism-proof as possible.
Reprocessing using any of the technologies likely to be available in
the near-term points in the wrong direction on every count.\23\ Those
who hope for a bright future for nuclear energy, therefore, should
oppose near-term reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\23\ For earlier discussions of this point, see, for example, John
P. Holdren, ``Improving U.S. Energy Security and Reducing Greenhouse-
Gas Emissions:The Role of Nuclear Energy,'' testimony to the
Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, Committee on Science, U.S.
House of Representatives, July 25, 2000, available as of June 10, 2005
at http://bcsia.ksg.harvard.edu/
publication.cfm?program=CORE&ctype=testimony&item-id=9; and
Matthew Bunn, ``Enabling A Significant Future For Nuclear Power:
Avoiding Catastrophes, Developing New Technologies, Democratizing
Decisions--And Staying Away From Separated Plutonium,'' in Proceedings
of Global '99: Nuclear Technology--Bridging the Millennia, Jackson
Hole, Wyoming, August 30-September 2, 1999 (La Grange Park, Ill.:
American Nuclear Society, 1999, available as of June 10, 2005 at http:/
/bcsia.ksg.harvard.edu/
publication.cfm?program=CORE&ctype=book&item-id=2).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Biography for Matthew Bunn
Matthew Bunn is a Senior Research Associate in the Project on
Managing the Atom in the Belfer Center for Science and International
Affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
His current research interests include nuclear theft and terrorism;
security for weapons-usable nuclear material in the former Soviet Union
and worldwide; verification of nuclear stockpiles and of nuclear
warhead dismantlement; disposition of excess plutonium; conversion in
Russia's nuclear cities; and nuclear waste storage, disposal, and
reprocessing.
Before joining the Kennedy School in January 1997, he served for
three years as an adviser to the Office of Science and Technology
Policy, where he played a major role in U.S. policies related to the
control and disposition of weapons-usable nuclear materials in the U.S.
and the former Soviet Union, and directed a secret study for President
Clinton on security for nuclear materials in Russia. Previously, Bunn
was at the National Academy of Sciences, where he directed the two-
volume study Management and Disposition of Excess Weapons Plutonium. He
is a consultant to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, and a member of the
Board of Directors of the Russian-American Nuclear Security Advisory
Council (an organization devoted to promoting nuclear security
cooperation between the United States and Russia), the Arms Control
Association, and the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation.
Bunn is the author or co-author of a dozen books and book-length
technical reports (most recently including Securing the Bomb 2005: The
New Global Imperatives), and dozens of articles in magazines and
newspapers ranging from Foreign Policy and The Washington Post to
Science and Nuclear Technology. He appears regularly on television and
radio. Bunn received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in political
science, specializing in defense and arms control, from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985. He is married to
Jennifer Weeks, and lives in Watertown, Massachusetts. They have two
daughters, Claire and Nina.
Chairwoman Biggert. Thank you.
Dr. Hagengruber, you are recognized for five minutes.
STATEMENT OF DR. ROGER HAGENGRUBER, DIRECTOR, OFFICE FOR
POLICY, SECURITY AND TECHNOLOGY; DIRECTOR, INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC
POLICY; AND, PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF NEW
MEXICO
Dr. Hagengruber. Thank you, Madame Chairman, and I
appreciate the invitation by the Committee to----
Chairwoman Biggert. If you could, pull the mike a little
bit closer to you. Thank you.
Dr. Hagengruber. Thank you, Madame Chairman. I appreciate
the invitation of the Committee to testify today.
As you mentioned earlier, the Nuclear Energy Study Group
was convened by the American Physical Society's Panel on Public
Affairs. We have a report, which we have submitted for the
record.
I--it treats several matters related to nuclear energy.
The first is related to the question of reprocessing. At
this point, we don't see a foreseeable expansion of nuclear
power in the United States that would make a qualitative change
to the need for spent fuel storage, at least for a few decades.
Even though Yucca Mountain may be delayed considerably, the
interim storage of spent fuel in dry casks, it--the current
sites, or at a few regional sites, is, we believe, safe and
affordable, at least for a couple of decades into the future.
So we believe that there is time to be able to take a more
enduring and prudent decision with respect to reprocessing in
regard to the issue of proliferation.
We have identified a number of areas in our report of
proliferation-resistant and cost-effective technologies that we
think should be pursued. Some of these are, in fact, being
addressed in the Department of Energy. They include issues of
integration of advanced safeguards into reprocessing systems,
additional approaches to adulterating or making the material
less attractive. But I think that a detailed examination by
nuclear weapon experts of the viability of this material in a
true national nuclear weapons program is desperately needed,
and that is an extensive and rather detailed classified portion
of research, which I do not believe, at this point, has been
accomplished.
We think, in a way, it is in the best interest of the
United States to maintain a reprocessing research program and
to seek proliferation-resistant and cost-effective reprocessing
technologies if they can be found. We don't oppose the eventual
reprocessing but believe an early decision, given the current
status, could threaten the growth of the use of nuclear energy
in the future. And by the way, nuclear energy growth is
something that the American Physical Society supports and
supports quite strongly.
We don't think that we should force a decision that might
diminish the growing momentum for nuclear energy. An early
decision on reprocessing may not have the policy robustness
that can sustain it through the next two decades of almost
certain persistent threat of proliferation. From our decade's
worth of work and public survey on nuclear matters at the
University of New Mexico, we know that energy and waste
management issues are not as volatile in the minds of the
public as the issue of proliferation.
The goal of our recommendations here is straightforward. If
reprocessing technology is determined to be adequately
proliferation-resistant and cost-effective, reprocessing can
emerge then as a consensus decision with industrial,
scientific, political, and public support. The stronger the
consensus, in my view, the more sustainable the momentum for
nuclear energy, and the more assured that the schedule for
proceeding with the nuclear fuel cycle for the rest of this
century.
On the other hand, we recognize the importance of
timetables and respect Chairman Hobson's desire to have people
appear by 2007 with some decisions made, and we certainly
applaud that, because it does tend to force people to move. We
would suggest, perhaps, that maybe 2007 is a good time to look
at the status of the development of technologies for this
purpose. Maybe they will be ready to go forward. But when those
hearings are held, we think that strong and vigorous
discussions should occur over the proliferation-resistance
associated with these technologies, not just in the United
States, we are not the threat of proliferation, but if, in
fact, pursued across the world.
Now we want to address one last item before completing my
testimony, and that is the importance of reinvigorating
research and development in technical safeguards for the
International Atomic Energy Commission. Most of the technology
today that has provided safeguards that detected programs in
North Korea and in Iran is technology that was developed in a
vigorous program conducted during the 1970s. This program at
the time, in today's dollars, probably numbered some tens of
millions of dollars. Today's investment in research and
development for international safeguards is only a few million
dollars, and is a very small amount of money considering the
opportunities provided by the advanced technologies of this
decade and the decade before. In addition, the expansion of
enhanced safeguards by the International Atomic Energy
Commission during the 1990s offers opportunities for monitoring
that are unprecedented in the first two decades of the NPT.
There are a number of areas, just to illustrate the point,
we know today how to produce cost-effective, internationally-
acceptable, continuous monitoring through satellite links,
providing assured security for an instance of air sampling
systems that can be used in conjunction with reprocessing or
enrichment facilities. It is literally impossible for such
facilities to, in fact, create unapproved procedures or
material without being detected in some fashion by that type of
rigorous sampling. In addition, the control that we use
frequently in our nuclear weapons, the things that have assured
us with this very high reliability associated with nuclear
things, can, in fact, be integrated into the operations of
facilities, assuring more detectable capability on the part of
the United States to be able to see the operation of facilities
in unauthorized ways.
In conclusion, the extent to which nuclear power will be an
enduring option to meet future energy requirements in many
regions of the world depend upon the steps that Congress takes
now to manage the associated proliferation risks. Prudent
management requires pursuing proliferation-resistant
technologies exclusively and developing international
agreements that limit the spread of enrichment facilities and
investing in a strong safeguards program.
Subject to your questions, that is my testimony, Madame
Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Hagengruber follows:]
Prepared Statement of Roger Hagengruber
Thank you Congresswoman Biggert and Members of the Subcommittee for
the opportunity to testify.
I'm Roger Hagengruber. I am a physicist by training and currently
Director of the Office for Policy, Security and Technology (OPS&T) at
the University of New Mexico. From 1991 to 1999, I was Senior Vice
President of Sandia National Laboratory directing their nuclear weapons
programs. I spent much of my more than 30 years at Sandia in arms
control and non-proliferation activities including several tours in
Geneva as a negotiator.
I am also Chair of the Nuclear Energy Study Group (NESG), convened
by the Panel on Public Affairs of the American Physical Society. We
examined technical options for raising the barrier between nuclear
power and nuclear weapons proliferation. With your permission, I would
like to include a copy of the report in the hearing record.
We reached conclusions in three general areas: technical
safeguards, proliferation resistance evaluation & design, and
reprocessing.
Let me first say that I am presenting the consensus view of a
diverse group of scientists who are experts on nuclear power and
proliferation issues. Over the course of their careers, members of the
NESG held positions as DOE Undersecretary of Energy, Chair of the DOE
Nuclear Energy Research Advisory Committee, director of research for
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and acting Assistant Secretary of
Defense.
Over the course of several months of discussion, we developed a
consensus position on reprocessing. Here are our three main points:
There is no urgent need to reprocess.
Take the time to get the science right.
Do no harm.
Let me say a few words about each point.
No Urgency
No foreseeable expansion of nuclear power in the U.S. will make a
qualitative change to the need for spent fuel storage over the next few
decades. Even though Yucca Mountain may be delayed considerably,
interim storage of spent fuel in dry casks, either at current reactor
sites, or at a few regional facilities, or at a single national
facility, is safe and affordable for a period of at least 50 years.
The U.S. can take some of the next ten years to evaluate
technologies and make a more enduring and prudent decision on
reprocessing.
Get the Science Right
A decision on reprocessing shouldn't outpace the science. DOE
should take the necessary time to carry out more thorough reprocessing
research to identify the most proliferation resistant and cost
effective technology. Examples of areas of research that could be most
useful are:
-- Detailed evaluations by nuclear weapons experts regarding
the implications of the reprocessed material on a reliable yet
concealable weapons program by a proliferating country.
-- Concepts for the integration of advanced safeguards (e.g.,
use control) into reprocessing systems.
-- Additional approaches to increasing the inherent protection
of the reprocessed material by additional adulteration or other
means.
And let me be clear, it is in the best interests of the U.S. to
maintain a reprocessing research program and seek a proliferation
resistant and cost-effective reprocessing technology. We do not oppose
eventual reprocessing, but believe an early decision, given the current
status, could threaten future growth in the use of nuclear energy.
We believe that by pursuing appropriate reprocessing technology
that gives the highest priority to proliferation resistance, the U.S.
retains the ability to influence future directions, both technical and
institutional, of the international community.
Do No Harm
We should not force a decision that might diminish the growing
momentum for nuclear power.
We should take a lesson from the past. More than forty years ago,
the Atomic Energy Commission, in an effort to establish a self-
sufficient, domestic commercial nuclear power industry, set in motion
the transfer of nuclear fuel reprocessing from the Federal Government
to private industry. In response to this call, Nuclear Fuel Services, a
private company, built the West Valley plutonium reprocessing plant in
upstate New York but without addressing economic and safety issues
adequately. The plant began operating in 1966 and closed six years
later to address safety, environmental and efficiency problems. It
never re-opened. The costs for retrofitting were too high, and public
concern about the plant had grown too large.
I think the lesson is clear: we must be cautious and not rush into
reprocessing again until the safety, proliferation and cost issues are
well understood and have been addressed properly.
The goal of our recommendations is straightforward: If a
reprocessing technology is determined to be adequately proliferation
resistant and cost-effective, reprocessing can emerge as a consensus
decision with industrial, scientific, political, and public support.
That said, I have to make a confession. As a former VP of Sandia, I
recognize the value of timetables. I understand the importance of
Congressman Hobson requiring action by 2007.
Timetables keep programs from becoming endless academic exercises.
And while the science may not be able to deliver a proliferation
resistant and cost-effective technology by 2007, that doesn't mean you
don't try.
So, I applaud Congressman Hobson for challenging the scientists to
deliver. That is an effective way to motivate programs.
Nevertheless, I think we should be cautious about our expectations.
The lesson from the Nation's West Valley foray is that we must proceed
carefully.
So, I would make a modest suggestion.
Yes, as Congressman Hobson requires, have the DOE report on the
state of reprocessing science in 2007. But, instead of having DOE
recommend a particular technology that ``should'' be implemented in
2007--I suggest that DOE identify the most promising technology at that
juncture were a decision to be made to begin development and that its
report include a detailed discussion of the relationship of the
technology to the prospect of proliferation. And we must be realistic
in our expectations. It may be that despite the best efforts of all
involved, the most promising technology in 2007 may still not be
satisfactory to all the necessary stakeholders.
I'm recommending a modest change of tone. The change keeps a
reprocessing decision as a goal but maintains an open view on the
ability to deliver a cost-effective and truly proliferation resistant
technology by 2007.
The DOE is currently researching reprocessing technologies
including pyroprocessing and UREX+. An aspect of assessing
proliferation resistance is determining whether the intensity of
radioactive ``self-protection'' of the resulting waste is sufficient to
prevent or deter its clandestine development into a nuclear weapon.
Our study group considered the proliferation resistance of UREX+.
Some members believed that the current version of UREX+ would create a
plutonium byproduct so hot that it was incapable of being used to make
a weapon. Others thought that UREX+ ``self-protection'' is lower than
the ``self-protection'' of current U.S. fuel cycle waste.
Research is on going at DOE to settle this question. We'll see what
the research bears out. But, based on my nearly 20 years of involvement
in nuclear weapons design I'll make one observation. The ultimate
assessment should not be based on whether it is theoretically possible
to make a weapon from the waste. A meaningful assessment must evaluate
practical factors associated with making a weapon: the level of
technical sophistication, the willingness to assume risk, the financial
resources available, and the likelihood of success. These are difficult
factors to evaluate--some of them will require extensive classified
treatment--but I urge DOE to approach the assessment in this manner.
If no cost-effective and proliferation resistant reprocessing
technology emerges in 2007, then the U.S. will continue to promote its
current path of open-cycle & enrichment. A number of experts are
concerned that this path presents significant proliferation risks, as
evidenced by Iran. I concur; the spread of centrifuge technology is a
significant national security risk.
There are numerous proposals for new international agreements to
limit the spread of enrichment technologies. In our report we examined
technical steps to limit proliferation. These steps will be most
effective when coupled with changes in institutional arrangements.
The first technological step is to improve the primary line of
defense against proliferation--international technical safeguards.
Technical safeguards used by the International Atomic Energy Agency
sound alarms as soon as nuclear systems stray from peaceful use. They
have proven value. In North Korea, environmental sampling helped show
that North Korea was making false claims about its reprocessing
activities. In Iran, disclosures by opposition groups plus surveillance
technologies and environmental sampling are revealing the status of
Iran's nuclear program.
Most of the implemented safeguards technologies are the result of
scientific work done decades ago. Proliferators are adaptive and
motivated adversaries; yet, we are currently relying on technology that
is almost as dated as a rotary phone. We must re-invigorate our
safeguards R&D program. I'll mention two of the ten R&D focus areas
identified in our report.
More inspectors carrying out more inspections is not a sustainable
path--instead, next generation safeguards must spur a transition from
the current system of periodic manual inspections to a reliable and
cost-effective system of continuous remote monitoring. Also, more
aggressive safeguards should be explored that would shut down a
facility found to be violating international operating agreements.
There are numerous other examples that represent ``fruit ripe for the
picking'' as opposed to research that may never become practical.
Additional progress in safeguards should involve collaborative research
with international partners. In this regard, the large programs to
improve the security of nuclear material in Russia and to assist in
conversion offer major opportunities to advance joint safeguards
concept to the IAEA.
Unfortunately, as we understand it, the current fiscal year 2005
international safeguards-related technology budget in NNSA (which we
believe is already several times too small) was just reduced. At the
very time when some would seek more rapid progress on the future of
nuclear energy, modern safeguards and a deeper analysis regarding
proliferation may be left in the dust. As a nation, we may live to
regret our inadequate resources and emphasis in this area because for
the future of nuclear energy, ``ignorance is not bliss.''
Another technical step to manage global proliferation risks is
designing proliferation resistance technology directly into the new
nuclear power plants and enrichment facilities. Making proliferation
resistance a design criterion would re-shuffle the priority of future
reactors. Some fuel-cycles would be deferred, while smaller, modular,
reactor designs might receive more emphasis. By carrying out this step
with commercial participation, proliferation resistance can emerge as a
strength of our nuclear industry. We think that Congress should be very
demanding regarding measures of proliferation resistance in any
proposed further technical initiatives.
In conclusion, the extent to which nuclear power will be an
enduring option to meeting future energy requirements in many regions
of the world depends upon the steps Congress takes now to manage the
associated proliferation risks. Prudent management requires exclusively
pursuing proliferation resistant technologies, developing international
agreements that limit the spread of enrichment facilities and investing
in a strong safeguards program.
I'm happy to answer any questions.
Biography for Roger Hagengruber
Roger Hagengruber, Ph.D., is the Director of the Office for Policy,
Security and Technology (OPS&T) and the Institute for Public Policy
(IPP) and a Professor of Political Science at the University of New
Mexico. He was formerly a Senior Vice President at Sandia National
Laboratories. From 1991-99, he directed Sandia's primary mission in
nuclear weapons during the transition following the end of the Cold
War. He spent much of his 30-year career at Sandia in arms control and
non-proliferation activities including several tours in Geneva as a
negotiator. In recent years, he has focused on the nuclear transition
in the former Soviet Union and in security issues associated with
counter-terrorism and has chaired or served on numerous panels that
have addressed these areas. He has traveled widely including many
visits to Russia where he led the large interactive program between
Sandia and the FSU.
His work at the University of New Mexico includes directing the IPP
work in public survey including sampling of U.S. and European views on
a wide range of security issues. The OPS&T is a relatively new function
at UNM that creates multidisciplinary teams from labs and universities
to execute projects that explore policy options in areas where security
and technology are interrelated.
Dr. Hagengruber has a Ph.D. in experimental nuclear physics from
the University of Wisconsin and is a graduate of the Industrial College
of the Armed Forces. He has been associated with UNM since 1975.
Chairwoman Biggert. Thank you very much, Doctor.
Dr. Finck, you are recognized for five minutes.
STATEMENT OF DR. PHILLIP J. FINCK, DEPUTY ASSOCIATE LABORATORY
DIRECTOR, APPLIED SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY AND NATIONAL SECURITY,
ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY
Dr. Finck. Madame Chairwoman, Representative Honda, Members
of the Subcommittee, it is my pleasure to be here today to
testify on technical aspects of nuclear fuel reprocessing, and
I have submitted a more detailed written statement for the
record.
I am going to discuss how advanced nuclear fuel cycles can
help mitigate the accumulation of spent nuclear fuel, and I
will also describe the major options available and their
respective advantages and disadvantages.
And I have brought two charts to help frame this
discussion.
[Chart.]
The first chart that is on your right illustrates projected
scenarios for the accumulation of spent nuclear fuel in the
United States until the end of this century. Two limits to--
related to the Yucca Mountain repository are important.
First is the legislative limit of 70,000 metric tons of
spent nuclear fuel that will be reached around 2010.
Second is a technical limit of the repository's capacity of
approximately 120,000 metric tons, which will be reached around
2030, assuming nuclear maintains its current market share. But
if we can implement advanced fuel cycles rapidly enough, the
amount of spent nuclear fuel could be systematically managed to
remain below the Yucca Mountain technical limit, as indicated
by the blue curve on the plot on the left.
The right-hand side of that chart illustrates also a key
technical point for spent nuclear fuel. It is compromised
primarily of uranium that, if separated from the fuel, can be
disposed of as low-level waste or reused. The technical
difficulties for disposal lie with the remaining elements that
create short- and long-term heat loads and contribute to
estimated doses at the boundary of the repository. In
particular, it must be noted that the technical capacity of
Yucca Mountain is limited by the very long-term heat generated
by isotopes of plutonium, americium, and neptunium. To
effectively manage repository space, these should be eliminated
or significantly reduced. Reprocessing can separate these
elements from the spent fuel, which makes it a first necessary
step to eliminate them and must then be followed by recycle.
[Chart.]
The second chart on your left illustrates the three major
options for managing spent nuclear fuel. The once-through
cycle, that we are doing today in the United States, consists
of sending the unprocessed spent fuel to the repository. Costs
are fixed to one mill per kilowatt-hour, but the repository is
not yet available. The mountain picture on the right
illustrates how much repository space the United States needs
to deal with the spent fuel.
Limited recycle is currently implemented in France and will
soon be implemented in Japan. And that is the second picture.
The spent fuel is reprocessed, and pure plutonium is separated
and recycled as mixed-oxide fuel, partially burned in a
commercial reactor and then stored or sent to disposal. The
benefits to our repository would be quite limited, only an
improvement of about 10 percent. This scheme as implemented
today also raises the flag of proliferation risk. Claims that
this scheme is overly expensive are not correct. The life cycle
cost of limited recycle, using real actual French data, is only
a few percent higher than that for the once-through option.
The last option, full recycle, is being researched
intensely in the United States, France, Japan, and to some
extent, in Russia. The U.S. approach relies on advanced
technologies that significantly mitigate the disadvantages of
the limited recycle option.
The first step, separations, could rely on the UREX+
technology that minimizes liquid waste streams, separates key
elements in groups that are well suited for transmutation in
different reactors. It offers a significant advantage for
nonproliferation as we can effectively eliminate the risk of
material diversion or facility misuse by developing advanced
monitoring, modeling, and detection technologies, and
integrating these technologies within the plant design. Also,
consolidation of reprocessing facilities could be a key aspect
for increasing proliferation resistance.
The second step consists of partially recycling plutonium,
neptunium, and some other elements in thermal reactors. This
step is not necessary, but may have an economic advantage that
must be balanced with proliferation concerns.
The last step consists of closing the fuel cycle by
transmuting all remaining elements in fast reactors using
pyroprocessing separations technology, with enhanced
proliferation resistance.
The full recycle option, as presented here, has major
benefits.
It increases repository space utilization by a factor of
more than 100 and delays the need for a second repository well
into the next century. It eliminates all isotopes that are a
proliferation concern. It allows adoption of modern separations
and safeguards technologies that will greatly increase its
proliferation resistance. The increase in life cycle costs is
10 percent or less according to OECD studies, and this must be
contrasted with the significant benefits of this approach,
particularly with regard to the cost and difficulties of a
second repository.
To conclude, we believe that the technologies being
considered today are mature enough to justify a down-selection
by 2007 and the startup of an engineering-scale demonstration
that could lead to large-scale commercialization. It is
critical that the down-selection and demonstration be performed
not only for reprocessing technologies but in concert with
research in recycle technologies, including fast reactors.
Thank you, again, for the opportunity to testify before you
on this timely and very important subject, and I would be
pleased to answer any questions you might have.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Finck follows:]
Prepared Statement of Phillip J. Finck
SUMMARY
Management of spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear reactors
can be addressed in a comprehensive, integrated manner to enable safe,
emissions-free, nuclear electricity to make a sustained and growing
contribution to the Nation's energy needs. Legislation limits the
capacity of the Yucca Mountain repository to 70,000 metric tons from
commercial spent fuel and DOE defense-related waste. It is estimated
that this amount will be accumulated by approximately 2010 at current
generation rates for spent nuclear fuel. To preserve nuclear energy as
a significant part of our future energy generating capability, new
technologies can be implemented that allow greater use of the
repository space at Yucca Mountain. By processing spent nuclear fuel
and recycling the hazardous radioactive materials, we can reduce the
waste disposal requirements enough to delay the need for a second
repository until the next century, even in a nuclear energy growth
scenario. Recent studies indicate that such a closed fuel cycle may
require only minimal increases in nuclear electricity costs, and are
not a major factor in the economic competitiveness of nuclear power
(the University of Chicago study, ``The Economic Future of Nuclear
Power,'' August 2004). However, the benefits of a closed fuel cycle can
not be measured by economics alone; resource optimization and waste
minimization are also important benefits. Moving forward in 2007 with
an engineering-scale demonstration of an integrated system of
proliferation-resistant, advanced separations and transmutation
technologies would be an excellent first step in demonstrating all of
the necessary technologies for a sustainable future for nuclear energy.
Nuclear Waste and Sustainability
World energy demand is increasing at a rapid pace. In order to
satisfy the demand and protect the environment for future generations,
energy sources must evolve from the current dominance of fossil fuels
to a more balanced, sustainable approach. This new approach must be
based on abundant, clean, and economical energy sources. Furthermore,
because of the growing worldwide demand and competition for energy, the
United States vitally needs to establish energy sources that allow for
energy independence.
Nuclear energy is a carbon-free, secure, and reliable energy source
for today and for the future. In addition to electricity production,
nuclear energy has the promise to become a critical resource for
process heat in the production of transportation fuels, such as
hydrogen and synthetic fuels, and desalinated water. New nuclear plants
are imperative to meet these vital needs.
To ensure a sustainable future for nuclear energy, several
requirements must be met. These include safety and efficiency,
proliferation resistance, sound nuclear materials management, and
minimal environmental impacts. While some of these requirements are
already being satisfied, the United States needs to adopt a more
comprehensive approach to nuclear waste management. The environmental
benefits of resource optimization and waste minimization for nuclear
power must be pursued with targeted research and development to develop
a successful integrated system with minimal economic impact.
Alternative nuclear fuel cycle options that employ separations,
transmutation, and refined disposal (e.g., conservation of geologic
repository space) must be contrasted with the current planned approach
of direct disposal, taking into account the complete set of potential
benefits and penalties. In many ways, this is not unlike the premium
homeowners pay to recycle municipal waste.
The spent nuclear fuel situation in the United States can be put in
perspective with a few numbers. Currently, the country's 103 commercial
nuclear reactors produce more than 2,000 metric tons of spent nuclear
fuel per year (masses are measured in heavy metal content of the fuel,
including uranium and heavier elements). The Yucca Mountain repository
has a legislative capacity of 70,000 metric tons, including spent
nuclear fuel and DOE defense-related wastes. By approximately 2010 the
accumulated spent nuclear fuel generated by these reactors and the
defense-related waste will meet this capacity, even before the
repository starts accepting any spent nuclear fuel. The ultimate
technical capacity of Yucca Mountain is expected to be around 120,000
metric tons, using the current understanding of the Yucca Mountain site
geologic and hydrologic characteristics. This limit will be reached by
including the spent fuel from current reactors operating over their
lifetime. Assuming nuclear growth at a rate of 1.8 percent per year
after 2010, the 120,000 metric ton capacity will be reached around
2030. At that projected nuclear growth rate, the U.S. will need up to
nine Yucca Mountain-type repositories by the end of this century. Until
Yucca Mountain starts accepting waste, spent nuclear fuel must be
stored in temporary facilities, either storage pools or above ground
storage casks.
Today, many consider repository space a scarce resource that should
be managed as such. While disposal costs in a geologic repository are
currently quite affordable for U.S. electric utilities, accounting for
only a few percent of the total cost of electricity, the availability
of U.S. repository space will likely remain limited.
Only three options are available for the disposal of accumulating
spent nuclear fuel:
Build more ultimate disposal sites like Yucca
Mountain.
Use interim storage technologies as a temporary
solution.
Develop and implement advanced fuel cycles,
consisting of separations technologies that separate the
constituents of spent nuclear fuel into elemental streams, and
transmutation technologies that destroy selected elements and
greatly reduce repository needs.
A responsible approach to using nuclear power must always consider
its whole life cycle, including final disposal. We consider that
temporary solutions, while useful as a stockpile management tool, can
never be considered as ultimate solutions. It seems prudent that the
U.S. always have at least one set of technologies available to avoid
expanding geologic disposal sites.
Spent Nuclear Fuel
The composition of spent nuclear fuel poses specific problems that
make its ultimate disposal challenging. Fresh nuclear fuel is composed
of uranium dioxide (about 96 percent U238, and four percent U235).
During irradiation, most of the U235 is fissioned, and a small fraction
of the U238 is transmuted into heavier elements (known as
``transuranics''). The spent nuclear fuel contains about 93 percent
uranium (mostly U238), about one percent plutonium, less than one
percent minor actinides (neptunium, americium, and curium), and five
percent fission products. Uranium, if separated from the other
elements, is relatively benign, and could be disposed of as low-level
waste or stored for later use. Some of the other elements raise
significant concerns:
The fissile isotopes of plutonium, americium, and
neptunium are potentially usable in weapons and, therefore,
raise proliferation concerns. Because spent nuclear fuel is
protected from theft for about one hundred years by its intense
radioactivity, it is difficult to separate these isotopes
without remote handling facilities.
Three isotopes, which are linked through a decay
process (Pu241, Am241, and Np237), are the major contributors
to the estimated dose for releases from the repository,
typically occurring between 100,000 and one million years, and
also to the long-term heat generation that limits the amount of
waste that can be placed in the repository.
Certain fission products (cesium, strontium) are
major contributors to the repository's short-term heat load,
but their effects can be mitigated by providing better
ventilation to the repository or by providing a cooling-off
period before placing them in the repository.
Other fission products (Tc99 and I129) also
contribute to the estimated dose.
The time scales required to mitigate these concerns are daunting:
several of the isotopes of concern will not decay to safe levels for
hundreds of thousands of years. Thus, the solutions to long-term
disposal of spent nuclear fuel are limited to three options: the search
for a geologic environment that will remain stable for that period; the
search for waste forms that can contain these elements for that period;
or the destruction of these isotopes. These three options underlie the
major fuel cycle strategies that are currently being developed and
deployed in the U.S. and other countries.
Options for Disposing of Spent Nuclear Fuel
Three options are being considered for disposing of spent nuclear
fuel: the once-through cycle is the U.S. reference; limited recycle has
been implemented in France and elsewhere and is being deployed in
Japan; and full recycle (also known as the closed fuel cycle) is being
researched in the U.S., France, Japan, and elsewhere.
1. Once-through Fuel Cycle
This is the U.S. reference option where spent nuclear fuel is sent
to the geologic repository that must contain the constituents of the
spent nuclear fuel for hundreds of thousands of years. Several
countries have programs to develop these repositories, with the U.S.
having the most advanced program. This approach is considered safe,
provided suitable repository locations and space can be found. It
should be noted that other ultimate disposal options have been
researched (e.g., deep sea disposal; boreholes and disposal in the sun)
and abandoned. The challenges of long-term geologic disposal of spent
nuclear fuel are well recognized, and are related to the uncertainty
about both the long-term behavior of spent nuclear fuel and the
geologic media in which it is placed.
2. Limited Recycle
Limited recycle options are commercially available in France,
Japan, and the United Kingdom. They use the PUREX process, which
separates uranium and plutonium, and directs the remaining transuranics
to vitrified waste, along with all the fission products. The uranium is
stored for eventual reuse. The plutonium is used to fabricate mixed-
oxide fuel that can be used in conventional reactors. Spent mixed-oxide
fuel is currently not reprocessed, though the feasibility of mixed-
oxide reprocessing has been demonstrated. It is typically stored or
eventually sent to a geologic repository for disposal. Note that a
reactor partially loaded with mixed-oxide fuel can destroy as much
plutonium as it creates. Nevertheless, this approach always results in
increased production of americium, a key contributor to the heat
generation in a repository. This approach has two significant
advantages:
It can help manage the accumulation of plutonium.
It can help significantly reduce the volume of spent
nuclear fuel (the French examples indicate that volume
decreases by a factor of four).
Several disadvantages have been noted:
It results in a small economic penalty by increasing
the net cost of electricity a few percent.
The separation of pure plutonium in the PUREX process
is considered by some to be a proliferation risk; when mixed-
oxide use is insufficient, this material is stored for future
use as fuel.
This process does not significantly improve the use
of the repository space (the improvement is around 10 percent,
as compared to a factor of 100 for closed fuel cycles).
This process does not significantly improve the use
of natural uranium (the improvement is around 15 percent, as
compared to a factor of 100 for closed fuel cycles).
3. Full Recycle (the Closed Fuel Cycle)
Full recycle approaches are being researched in France, Japan, and
the United States. This approach typically comprises three successive
steps: an advanced separations step based on the UREX+ technology that
mitigates the perceived disadvantages of PUREX, partial recycle in
conventional reactors, and closure of the fuel cycle in fast reactors.
The first step, UREX+ technology, allows for the separations and
subsequent management of highly pure product streams. These streams
are:
Uranium, which can be stored for future use or
disposed of as low-level waste.
A mixture of plutonium and neptunium, which is
intended for partial recycle in conventional reactors followed
by recycle in fast reactors.
Separated fission products intended for short-term
storage, possibly for transmutation, and for long-term storage
in specialized waste forms.
The minor actinides (americium and curium) for
transmutation in fast reactors.
The UREX+ approach has several advantages:
It produces minimal liquid waste forms, and
eliminates the issue of the ``waste tank farms.''
Through advanced monitoring, simulation and modeling,
it provides significant opportunities to detect misuse and
diversion of weapons-usable materials.
It provides the opportunity for significant cost
reduction.
Finally and most importantly, it provides the
critical first step in managing all hazardous elements present
in the spent nuclear fuel.
The second step--partial recycle in conventional reactors--can
expand the opportunities offered by the conventional mixed-oxide
approach. In particular, it is expected that with significant R&D
effort, new fuel forms can be developed that burn up to 50 percent of
the plutonium and neptunium present in spent nuclear fuel. (Note that
some studies also suggest that it might be possible to recycle fuel in
these reactors many times--i.e., reprocess and recycle the irradiated
advanced fuel--and further destroy plutonium and neptunium; other
studies also suggest possibilities for transmuting americium in these
reactors. Nevertheless, the practicality of these schemes is not yet
established and requires additional scientific and engineering
research.) The advantage of the second step is that it reduces the
overall cost of the closed fuel cycle by burning plutonium in
conventional reactors, thereby reducing the number of fast reactors
needed to complete the transmutation mission of minimizing hazardous
waste. This step can be entirely bypassed, and all transmutation
performed in advanced fast reactors, if recycle in conventional
reactors is judged to be undesirable.
The third step, closure of the fuel cycle using fast reactors to
transmute the fuel constituents into much less hazardous elements, and
pyroprocessing technologies to recycle the fast reactor fuel,
constitutes the ultimate step in reaching sustainable nuclear energy.
This process will effectively destroy the transuranic elements,
resulting in waste forms that contain only a very small fraction of the
transuranics (less than one percent) and all fission products. These
technologies are being developed at Argonne National Laboratory and
Idaho National Laboratory, with parallel development in Japan, France,
and Russia.
The full recycle approach has significant benefits:
It can effectively increase use of repository space
by a factor of more than 100.
It can effectively increase the use of natural
uranium by a factor of 100.
It eliminates the uncontrolled buildup of all
isotopes that are a proliferation risk.
The fast reactors and the processing plant can be
deployed in small co-located facilities that minimize the risk
of material diversion during transportation.
The fast reactor does not require the use of very
pure weapons usable materials, thus increasing their
proliferation resistance.
It finally can usher the way towards full
sustainability to prepare for a time when uranium supplies will
become increasingly difficult to ensure.
These processes would have limited economic impact;
the increase in the cost of electricity would be less than 10
percent (ref: OECD).
Assuming that demonstrations of these processes are
started by 2007, commercial operations are possible starting in
2025; this will require adequate funding for demonstrating the
separations, recycle, and reactor technologies.
The systems can be designed and implemented to ensure
that the mass of accumulated spent nuclear fuel in the U.S.
would always remain below 100,000 metric tons--less than the
technical capacity of Yucca Mountain--thus delaying, or even
avoiding, the need for a second repository in the U.S.
Conclusion
A well engineered recycling program for spent nuclear fuel will
provide the United States with a long-term, affordable, carbon-free
energy source with low environmental impact. This new paradigm for
nuclear power will allow us to manage nuclear waste and reduce
proliferation risks while creating a sustainable energy supply. It is
possible that the cost of recycling will be slightly higher than direct
disposal of spent nuclear fuel, but the Nation will only need one
geologic repository for the ultimate disposal of the residual waste.
APPENDIX 1:
Reprocessing Technologies
There are currently three mature options to reprocess spent nuclear
fuel.
PUREX--Is the most common liquid-liquid extraction process for
treatment of light water reactor spent fuel. The irradiated fuel is
dissolved in nitric acid, and uranium and plutonium are extracted in
the organic phase by an organic solvent consisting of tributyl
phosphate in kerosene, while the fission products remain in the aqueous
nitric phase. Further process steps enable the subsequent separation of
uranium from plutonium.
Advantages--fully commercialized process, with over 50 years of
experience.
Disadvantage--it is not efficient enough to achieve the present
requirements for separations of technetium, cesium, strontium,
neptunium, americium and curium.
UREX+--Is an advanced liquid-liquid extraction process for treatment of
light water reactor spent fuel. Similar to PUREX, the irradiated fuel
is dissolved in nitric acid. The UREX+ process consists of a series of
solvent-extraction steps for the recovery of Pu/Np, Tc, U, Cs/Sr, Am
and Cm.
Advantages--meets current separations requirements for continuous
recycle. Builds on engineering experience derived from current aqueous
reprocessing facilities such as La Hague.
Disadvantage--can not directly process short-cooled and some
specialty fuels being designed for advanced reactors.
Pyroprocessing--These technologies rely on electrochemical processes
rather than chemical extraction processes to achieve the desired degree
of conversion or purification of the spent fuel. If oxide fuel is
processed, it is converted to metal after the irradiated fuel is
disassembled. The metallic fuel is then treated to separate uranium and
the transuranic elements from the fission product elements.
Advantages--ability to process short-cooled and specialty fuels
being designed for advanced reactors.
Disadvantages--does not meet current separations requirements for
continuous recycle in thermal reactors, but ideal for fast spectrum
reactors.
APPENDIX 2:
Answers to Specific Questions
1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using reprocessing to
address efficiency of fuel use, waste management and non-proliferation?
How would you assess the advantages and disadvantages, and how might
the disadvantages be mitigated?
Reprocessing of spent fuel is a necessary step in an advanced fuel
cycle, but is insufficient to yield any significant benefits by itself:
benefits are only incurred once the reprocessed materials are recycled
and partially or totally eliminated. Two types of recycle schemes are
typically considered: limited recycle in conventional reactors, and
full recycle in advanced reactors.
Limited Recycle
Limited recycle options are commercially available in France,
Japan, and the United Kingdom. They utilize the PUREX process, which
separates uranium and plutonium, and directs the remaining transuranics
to vitrified waste, along with all the fission products. The uranium is
stored for eventual reuse. The plutonium is used to fabricate mixed
oxide (MOX) fuel that can be used in conventional reactors. Spent MOX
fuel is currently not reprocessed (though feasibility of MOX
reprocessing has been demonstrated) and is typically stored or
eventually sent to a geologic repository for disposal. Note that a
reactor partially loaded with MOX fuel can destroy as much plutonium as
it creates. Nevertheless, this approach always results in an increase
in the production of americium (a key contributor to the heat
generation in a repository). This approach has several advantages:
It can help manage the accumulation of plutonium.
It can help significantly reduce the volume of spent
nuclear fuel (SNF) (the French examples indicates a volume
decrease by a factor of four).
Several disadvantages have been noted:
It results in a small economic penalty, as the
increase in the net cost of electricity is a few percent.
The separation of pure plutonium in the PUREX process
is considered by some to be a proliferation risk; when MOX
utilization is insufficient, this material is stored for future
use as fuel.
This process does not significantly improve the
utilization of the repository space (the improvement is around
10 percent, as compared to a factor of 100 for closed fuel
cycles).
This process does not significantly improve the
utilization of natural uranium (the improvement is around 15
percent, as compared to a factor of 100 for closed fuel
cycles).
Full Recycle (the Closed Fuel Cycle)
Full recycle approaches are being researched in France, Japan, and
the United States. This approach is typically comprised of three
successive steps: an advanced separations step based on the UREX+
technology that mitigates the perceived disadvantages of PUREX, partial
recycle in conventional reactors, and closure of the fuel cycle in fast
reactors.
The first step, UREX+ technology, allows for the separations and
subsequent management of very pure streams of products. It produces the
following streams of products: uranium, that can be stored for future
use or can be disposed of as low-level waste; a mixture of plutonium
and neptunium that are intended for partial recycle in conventional
reactors followed by recycle in fast reactors; separated fission
products intended for short-term storage, possibly for transmutation,
and for long-term storage in specialized waste forms; and the minor
actinides (americium and curium) for transmutation in fast reactors.
The UREX+ approach has several advantages: it produces minimal liquid
waste forms (and eliminates the issue of the ``waste tank farms'');
through advanced monitoring, simulation and modeling it provides
significant opportunities for detecting misuse and diversion of weapons
usable materials; it provides the opportunity for significant cost
reduction; and, finally and most importantly, it provides the critical
first step in managing all hazardous elements present in the SNF.
The second step, partial recycle in conventional reactors can
expand the opportunities offered by the conventional MOX approach. In
particular, it is expected that with significant R&D effort, new fuel
forms can be developed that can burn up to 50 percent of the plutonium
and neptunium present in the SNF. (Note that some studies also suggest
that it might be possible to recycle fuel in these reactors multiple
times (i.e., reprocess and recycle the irradiated advanced fuel) and
further destroy plutonium and neptunium; other studies also suggest
possibilities for transmuting americium in these reactors.
Nevertheless, the practicality of these schemes is not yet established
and requires additional scientific and engineering research.) The
advantage of the second step is that it reduces the overall cost of the
closed fuel cycle by burning plutonium in conventional reactors, and
reducing the number of fast reactors needed to complete the
transmutation mission of minimizing hazardous waste. This step can be
entirely bypassed, and all transmutation performed in advanced fast
reactors, if recycle in conventional reactors is judged to be
undesirable.
The third step, closure of the fuel cycle, using fast reactors to
transmute the fuel constituents into much less hazardous elements, and
pyroprocessing technologies to recycle the fast reactor fuel,
constitutes the ultimate step in reaching sustainability for nuclear
energy. This process will effectively destroy the transuranic elements,
resulting in waste forms that contain only a very small fraction of the
transuranics (less than one percent) and all fission products. These
technologies are being developed at Argonne National Laboratory and
Idaho National Laboratory, with parallel development in Japan, France,
and Russia.
The full recycle approach has significant benefits:
-- It can effectively increase the utilization of the
repository space by a factor in excess of 100.
-- It can effectively increase the utilization of natural
uranium by a factor of 100.
-- It eliminates the uncontrolled buildup of all isotopes that
are a proliferation risk.
-- The fast reactors and the processing plant can be deployed
in small co-located facilities that minimize the risk of
material diversion during transportation.
-- The fast reactor does not require the use of very pure
weapons usable materials, thus increasing their proliferation
resistance.
-- It finally can usher the way towards full sustainability to
prepare for a time when uranium supplies will become
increasingly difficult to ensure.
-- These processes would have limited economic impact: the
increase in the cost of electricity would be less than 10
percent (ref: OECD).
-- Assuming that demonstration of these processes is started
by 2007, commercial operations are possible starting in 2025;
this will require adequate funding for demonstrating the
separations, recycle, and reactor technologies.
-- The systems can be designed and implemented to ensure that
the mass of accumulated SNF in the U.S. would always remain
below 100,000MT, (Note: less than the technical capacity of
Yucca Mountain) thus delaying, or even avoiding, the need for a
second repository in the U.S.
Several disadvantages have been noted:
-- These processes would have limited economic impact: the
increase in the cost of electricity would be less than 10
percent (ref: OECD).
-- Management of potentially weapons-usable materials may be
viewed as a proliferation risk.
These disadvantages can be addressed by specific actions:
-- Fuel cycle and reactor R&D is currently going on in the DOE
Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative (AFCI) and Gen-IV programs to
reduce the costs of processing, fuel fabrication, and advanced
reactors.
-- Advanced simulation, modeling, and detection techniques can
be used in fuel cycle facilities to improve material
accountability and decrease the risk of misuse or diversion.
-- An aggressive development and demonstration program of the
advanced reactors and recycling options is needed to allow
commercialization in a reasonable timeframe.
2. What are the greatest technological hurdles in developing and
commercializing advanced reprocessing technologies? Is it possible for
the government to select a technology by 2007?
To answer the first part of the question, the first major hurdle is
the current inability to test the chemical processing steps at a pilot-
scale using spent nuclear fuel (both as individual process steps and in
an integrated manner simulating plant operations) to verify that both
the process itself and the larger scale equipment will function as
intended, and to minimize the technical risks in designing the
commercial-scale plant. The processing methods currently being refined
under the scope of the DOE AFCI program are being designed to very high
standards for purity of products and efficiency of recovery, in order
to reduce costs and minimize the hazardous content of high-level
wastes. The processes have been successfully tested at laboratory scale
(about one-millionth of industrial scale). Normal expectations for
scale-up of industrial chemical processes are that the processes proven
in the laboratory will perform well at full scale, provided that the
process and equipment function as intended. In order to test process
operations and equipment designs, it is necessary to conduct pilot
plant operations at one/one-hundredth to one/one-thousandth of
industrial scale with the complete process.
The second major hurdle is related to the first, in that there is
an insufficient supply of some of the various chemical elements needed
for the development and testing of product storage forms and waste
disposal forms. However, it is anticipated that these would become
available as a result of pilot-scale testing, but the lack of materials
will hinder progress prior to that time.
For the second part of the question, yes, it is completely
reasonable to select a processing technology by 2007, given the present
state of development for the processing technologies. The level of
success achieved in the DOE AFCI program to date indicates that the
development of at least one processing technology satisfying program
goals, UREX+, will be advanced to the stage where pilot-scale testing
is warranted. At that time, it should also be possible to evaluate
whether any of the other promising technologies currently being studied
have proven capable of meeting program goals, and are also near to
pilot-scale testing.
However, it must be emphasized that the reprocessing technology by
itself will not provide any significant benefits unless the development
of such capability is matched by similar advances in recycling
technologies. In the case of full recycle, the development of both
suitable reactors for recycling transuranics and appropriate nuclear
fuel forms containing transuranics must proceed in parallel to testing
and implementation of spent fuel processing. Only with all of the
pieces in place will substantial benefits be achievable.
3. What reprocessing technologies currently are being developed at
Argonne or at other national labs? What technical questions must be
answered?
AFCI processing (chemical separations) technology is being
developed at Argonne National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory,
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia
National Laboratory, and Savannah River National Laboratory. All are
involved with the development of aqueous solvent extraction
technologies (the suite of UREX+ processes), while ANL and INL are also
developing the pyrochemical processing technology that will be required
for the nuclear fuel cycle associated with Gen-IV reactors. The aqueous
technology is needed for near-term application, and the emphasis is on
process optimization, equipment development, and plant design. The
pyrochemical technology is needed for deployment of the Gen-IV
reactors, and requires large scale demonstration. Emphasis on
pyroprocessing is in testing of process features, with some work in
progress on process equipment and facility design.
The UREX+ solvent extraction demonstrations have shown that it can
meet separations criteria; however, integrated, engineering-scale
testing is required to complete development. Continuing work is
required to optimize flowsheets and increase process robustness and
operations efficiency. An adequate facility is required for
engineering-scale demonstrations to test equipment, advanced
instrumentation for process control and PR&PP (Proliferation Resistance
and Physical Protection), conversion of product and waste forms.
Pyroprocessing requires continued process development followed by
engineering-scale demonstration of flowsheets developed for
reprocessing the many alternative advanced reactor fuels. Improvements
in the areas of transuranic element recovery and process equipment
design needs to be completed. Similar to the UREX+ process an adequate
facility is required for engineering-scale demonstration.
4. What reprocessing technologies are still in the basic research
stage, what advantages might they offer, and what is the estimated
timeline for development of laboratory scale models?
There are currently two mature technologies for reprocessing, UREX+
and pyroprocessing. For industrial scale implementation optimization of
these technologies is still necessary:
Off-gas treatment from fuel decladding and
dissolution for retention of tritium, carbon-14, ruthenium, and
technetium to prevent their migration to downstream operations
where they are harder to sequester. Development of high
efficiency scrubbers is currently an effort in other countries.
Advanced instrumentation and process-sampling
techniques for near real time accounting for process control
and material accountability.
Process diagnostics for early on-line detection using
signals from process instrumentation to differentiate
legitimate process operation versus clandestine product
diversion.
Waste forms optimization for preventing migration of
radionuclides and reduce potential heath hazard to the public.
Nevertheless, there are a number of novel technologies where basic
research could provide an alternative to the current technologies, with
the potential of minimizing dose to the public and workers and
environmental impacts. These research areas are:
Development of ligands, chelating agents, and
advanced extractant molecules based on fundamental principles
to guide their preparation. Advantages--molecules could be
tailored to perform a specific function such as separations of
a given transuranic element. Estimated timeline 20 years.
Development of environmentally benign separations
processes such as based on magnetic and electronic differences.
Advantages--produce minimum secondary wastes and significantly
decrease the consumption of chemicals. Estimated timeline 30
years.
Development of bio-based separations. Advantages--
identify methods and replicate biological compound functions
leading to new separation schemes, for example, separations of
actinides over lanthanides. Estimated timeline 50 years.
5. How would you contrast what is being done internationally with U.S.
plans for reprocessing, recycling and associated waste management? What
countries recycle now? What components of the waste fuel are or can be
used to make new reactor fuel?
Commercial reprocessing plants in France, the United Kingdom and
Japan utilize the PUREX process, which separates uranium and plutonium
and directs the remaining transuranics (americium, neptunium, and
curium) to vitrified waste along with all of the fission products.
Reprocessing operations in the U.K. may be terminated within the next
10 years, primarily because the shutdown of gas-cooled power reactors
is limiting the need for the Sellafield B-205 plant. BNFL's THORP plant
at Sellafield is principally used for light water reactor (LWR) spent
fuel processing; the U.K. has only one LWR in operation and the market
for foreign LWR fuel processing is decreasing. A shutdown of THORP has
been announced for 2010. In contrast, a vigorous reprocessing activity
is in progress in France at the La Hague plant of COGEMA. This plant is
processing spent fuel from foreign sources as well as from the 57 power
reactors of Electricite de France. Plutonium is recovered for recycle
to the EdF reactors as mixed oxide (MOX) fuel. Research on means for
improving waste management through reprocessing have been stimulated by
the 1991 law, and research is in progress now at the laboratories of
the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA) that is following much the
same lines as that pioneered in the AFCI program of DOE. Commercial
reprocessing will begin soon in Japan at the Rokkasho-mura plant of
Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd. The Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant is designed for
the production of a mixed uranium-plutonium product that can be used to
produce mixed oxide fuel for recycle in Japanese light water reactors.
Japanese laboratories are also experimenting with advanced spent fuel
processing methods.
The U.S. program represents a transition to an advanced nuclear
fuel cycle. In the U.S., emphasis is being placed on technologies that
can be successfully deployed in the next 20 years or so and be
economically competitive as well as secure against all threats. The
wastes arising from future U.S. process plants will be virtually free
of radiotoxic elements, and there will be no generation of liquid
wastes requiring underground tank storage. We expect our efforts to
help us regain international leadership in the field of nuclear energy.
Both Japan and France are currently developing advanced fuel
cycles, similar to the ones described in this paper, where there first
would be partial recycle in conventional reactors, followed by closure
of the fuel cycle in fast reactors. The U.S. program has had
significant international collaborations with these two countries, and
there have been excellent exchanges of research results. The approaches
in the three countries are relatively well aligned, with a stronger
emphasis on the short-term development of separations technologies in
the U.S., and a stronger emphasis on the long-term development of fast
reactors in France and Japan.
Biography for Phillip J. Finck
Phillip Finck received his Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from MIT in
1982, and a MBA in 2001 from the University of Chicago. He was a
mechanical engineer at NOVATOME, France from 1983 to 1986, and was
involved in the safety and design of fast reactors, including
Superphenix. In 1986, he joined Argonne National Laboratory and was
involved in neutronics methods development for the Integral Fast
Reactor concept, and later for the New Production Reactor. In 1991, he
became the lead for EBR-II neutronics analyses at ANL-E. In 1993 he
joined the French Atomic Energy Commission where he became the head of
the Reactor Physics Laboratory at the Cadarache Center, with activities
in LWR and LMR physics, criticality safety, fuel cycle physics, and
nuclear data. In 1995, he was elected to chair the European nuclear
data project--JEF. Dr. Finck rejoined ANL in 1997, where he became the
Associate Director of the Technology Development Division. He has led
the ANL activities in the Advanced Accelerator Applications program
since 2000, and has been heavily involved in transforming the program
from accelerator-based to reactor-based transmutation. In 2003 he was
named Deputy Associate Laboratory Director, Engineering Research, where
he was responsible for coordination of all nuclear energy related
activities at ANL, including AFCI and Gen-IV programs, and development
of new initiatives. Since 2004, Dr. Finck is the Deputy Associate
Laboratory Director for Applied Science and Technology and National
Security; in this position, he coordinates all energy-related
activities at ANL.
Dr. Finck is a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society.
Discussion
Chairwoman Biggert. Thank you very much for your testimony.
We will now turn to the questions, and I will yield five
minutes to the--Chairman Hobson.
Mr. Hobson. I just have, quickly, a couple of things,
because I have to leave, but I want to thank you all for your
testimony. I may not agree with all of it, but I like it. I
like the fact that we are having this dialogue, because it
wasn't happening.
Mr. Bunn, I would like to ask you, in your numbers that you
have put together, do you include any costs associated to the
liability increase each year that this government has to pay
the utilities for not removing the waste from their site?
Mr. Bunn. We include--one of the assumptions that we make
that is favorable to reprocessing, we tried to make
assumptions, in general, that were favorable to reprocessing in
order to be, you know, fair and ironclad in our conclusions.
And we assigned to the cost of the direct disposal option 100
percent of the cost of interim storage for many decades prior
to disposal, and we assumed that there was zero cost for
interim storage with respect--on the reprocessing side. So yes,
we did include that. And the costs of storage are actually----
Mr. Hobson. Oh, no, no, no. I am talking about the
liability----
Mr. Bunn. I understand that, but the liability----
Mr. Hobson.--cost. There is $500 million----
Mr. Bunn. The liability to the government depends on the
costs to store that fuel. The--if the government takes title to
that fuel and pays for its storage, then its liability is the--
--
Mr. Hobson. No, but you are making an assumption that would
take legislation, as I understand it, to do. Is that correct?
Mr. Bunn. I am saying that the government should not be in
the business of paying the utilities amounts that far exceed
their actual cost for storing the amount of nuclear fuel, and
therefore, one should look at what the cost of storing spent
fuel actually is. The cost of providing 40 years of dry cask
storage for spent fuel is less than $200 a kilogram. The cost
of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, even in a new facility,
financed entirely with government money at a low government
rate of interest, would be more than $1,000 a kilogram if its
capital and operating costs were identical to the costs of the
plants built in France and Britain, and much more than that if
it were identical to the cost of the most recent plant built in
Japan, whose costs are astronomical.
So it is really--it is quite a large difference. You will
find, if you talk to utilities, that none of them are
particularly interested in paying for reprocessing of their
spent fuel if they can simply buy dry casks.
Mr. Hobson. Well, a lot of them are trying to move them out
of the area that they have got them in, so----
Mr. Bunn. Yes, they would love to have the government take
it away. There is no doubt about that.
Mr. Hobson. No. No. Excuse me. They are providing a site in
Utah--they are attempting to provide a site in Utah, because
they want to move them----
Mr. Bunn. That is right.
Mr. Hobson.--out of the cities where they have got them.
Mr. Bunn. Right.
Mr. Hobson. And the security problems that they have, which
I am suspect of the--let me put it this way. I am suspect of
the numbers, but we will look at the numbers.
I would also like to ask you, have you visited the sites in
France?
Mr. Bunn. I have.
Mr. Hobson. And have you written the same negative
situation with the sites in France and encouraged them to do
away with their sites and get away from reprocessing? Because
if you look where those sites are, there are vineyards growing
up. And if you go to the Netherlands, there is a playground on
the other side. Obviously, there are differing opinions in the
world, and I am always interested how we always write about our
side of it, but we have not written--maybe you have, and I
don't know the answer. You should never ask a question you
don't know the answer to, but I am concerned that I don't see
the same concerns expressed about these existing facilities,
which what I have seen, seem to try to do it in a responsible
way, and have--don't have the reliance upon fossil fuels in
their country that we do, don't have the proliferation of the
air that we do from the plants. And my point is, we need to
move forward in this, but I don't see the same negatives
written about that that is written about our ability to try to
sustain our country. So I will let you answer that, and then I
will----
Mr. Bunn. Well, first of all, I am not against nuclear
energy. I am a supporter of nuclear energy, and as I made the
point at the end of my testimony, I believe that if--those who
support nuclear energy ought to be trying to make it as cheap,
as simple, as safe, and as non-controversial as possible in
order to build the support needed to grow nuclear energy. And I
think that reprocessing with traditional PUREX type
technologies, as implemented in France and Britain and Japan,
points in the wrong direction on every count. I have expressed
concern about the facilities in France and Britain and Japan
for many years, as have many of my colleagues. But the reality
is those facilities exist. Large investments have been made.
Those countries are not going to change their process--their
approaches any time soon. However, it is worth noting that when
those facilities were first built, they had substantial foreign
customers, and now the foreign customer base is dwindling away
to almost nothing, because utilities around the world are
realizing increasingly that dry cask storage offers a cheaper
alternative, which leaves all options open. There is nothing
that says that after you have stored spent fuel for 30 years in
a dry cask you can't then take it out and reprocess it later if
technology develops that is, in fact, more promising than the
traditional technologies. I should say that all of the numbers
we used with respect to the cost of reprocessing are drawn from
official French and British studies.
Mr. Hobson. Yes.
Mr. Bunn. They are the French and British numbers.
Mr. Hobson. Well, I like your final conclusions that you
came to on the processing. When you talked about--I will just
finish with this. When you talked about drying up, you mean on
the reprocessing side of it? Because the Germans, as I
understand it, are buying energy, as we speak, from----
Mr. Bunn. Yes, I mean, I----
Mr. Hobson.--the French----
Mr. Bunn. No, I mean the customers for the reprocessing
plants.
Mr. Hobson.--facilities. Okay.
Mr. Bunn. I mean the customers are----
Mr. Hobson. Okay. I am sorry.
Mr. Bunn.--from the reprocessing plants.
Mr. Hobson. Well, again, thank you all for--and I want to
thank the Chairwoman for this dialogue, because we weren't
having this dialogue. And what we need to do is continue having
this dialogue, in my opinion, so that we do move forward and
not just be in a stagnant situation, because every year that--
and I want to say in this forum before I leave, I am a big
proponent of Yucca Mountain. I will have a huge fight with the
Senate over that in getting it done. But I also understand that
there are some things we have got to do along the way. And what
we are both trying to do here is to create a dialogue that we
move forward, and if we don't put some things into legislation
and if we don't move and talk about this, we continue to be in
a stagnant position, and we will continue our reliance upon
fossil fuel, which I firmly believe we can not do. I don't
think environmentally it is appropriate, and we just physically
can't afford it in the future to continue in this way.
So I want to thank you again. I am going to have to leave,
and I want to thank the indulgence of the Committee for
allowing me to intrude to show support and to listen to all of
your testimony.
Mr. Bunn. Thank you.
Chairwoman Biggert. And thank you, Chairman Hobson, for all
of the work that you are doing on this. And thank you for
coming today.
And with that, I would recognize Ranking Member, Mr. Honda,
for five minutes.
Mr. Honda. Thank you very much.
I am going to set aside my written questions. I am going to
submit them, if you don't mind, Madame Chair, to the witnesses
and expect a written response from them.
What I heard this morning is a range of opinions, but what
I think I heard was that there is agreement that we need to
continue on R&D. And I am judging by the nod of the heads that
it sounds like that is correct.
Then the question is really is the process or the steps
that we need to take in order to get to a point where we think
that the disposition of spent fuel is the most appropriate and
the most safe way without rushing into a solution because of
political timelines and things like that? So I was just
wondering from each witness what their response is to each
other's comments and why they feel the way they do. I am not
trying to pit one against the other, but we have witnesses here
who have a lot of----
Mr. Johnson. A broad range of views.
Mr. Honda.--knowledge and experience, and I would sort of
like to listen to that before I ask any more questions. And we
could start with Mr. Johnson.
Mr. Johnson. Thank you, sir.
I guess I would like to begin my answer by agreeing with
your observation. I believe that what you heard this morning is
there is more agreement among us than, possibly, disagreement
with respect to the need of moving forward with a robust
research and development program on the issue of spent nuclear
fuel, recycle technologies, safeguard technologies. And the
Department very much is supportive of that, and as you have
seen in our budget request for the last couple of years, we are
continuing to move forward in trying to walk through in a step-
wise, reasonable fashion the development of the technologies
needed to address the issues associated with spent nuclear
fuel.
I believe I will leave my comments at that. Thank you.
Mr. Honda. Oh, okay.
Mr. Bunn. I am a supporter of continued research and
development, but I think even with respect to research and
development, we need to be very careful with respect to the
proliferation implications. For example, I am somewhat
concerned over pursuing research and development on
reprocessing technologies with South Korea, which is a country
that has a formal agreement not to have either enrichment or
reprocessing on its soil. It is a country that had a secret
nuclear weapons program that was stopped under U.S. pressure
that was based on plutonium reprocessing. And some of these
technologies, while they may reduce some of the hazards of
PUREX, are not as proliferation-resistant if you look at the
contribution they could make to the acquisition of the needed
expertise and facilities if they were broadly deployed in the
developing world--the contribution to a proliferating state's
nuclear weapons program.
Moreover, some of the technologies, the amount of other
things that are being separated and cycled with the plutonium
is pretty minor. In the case of UREX+, essentially, as I
understand it, what you are--what is separated with the
plutonium is the neptunium. Neptunium-237 is also a potentially
attractive nuclear weapons material. So one has to worry about
the possibility of theft of materials containing plutonium and
neptunium-237 perhaps somewhat less than one would about theft
of pure plutonium. But that is the kind of thing that requires
the fact-finding examination that Dr. Hagengruber was talking
about.
I should mention, since I have been questioned on the
subject of our economic assumptions and so on, that I did bring
a number of copies of the full study, which has the complete
references and so on. It is available on-line at a link that is
included in my testimony, and I would like to submit, for the
record, the article-length version of which is in the current
issue of Nuclear Technology.
[The information follows:]
Chairwoman Biggert. Without objection.
Mr. Honda. Thank you.
Dr. Hagengruber. Yeah, a very interesting question to be
done with an answer to be compact. Unfortunately, I am the age
where I started more than 35 years ago, my first study was to
look at long-term and short-term technical approaches to
nuclear waste. The reactors cost $1 billion at the time. There
wasn't a Three Mile Island. There wasn't a study on it, and
there wasn't a Carter decision on reprocessing. And it seems
like I have seen all of this before. We knew how to reprocess
material in a way that produced the closed fuel cycle. We knew
what the nuclear waste issues were, including interim storage
as a very attractive option. We had lots of technical
opportunities that were demonstrated up in Idaho and other
places and Hanford for how to dispose the material, maybe not
as good as today, but it is hard to see the last 30 years as
having made that much progress.
The issue, in the end, wasn't the cost of nuclear power and
the issue of interest rates and--I mean, West Valley was built
and then shut down not--in part not because the technology
failed, but the basic decision of the infrastructure and the
supporting infrastructure had a hole in it. The hole is that
proliferation became an increasing concern, not just because it
was President Carter. It was a national concern. There were the
London Suppliers Group and other people got together, and
decisions were struggled with, not consensus, to decide whether
or not to reprocess in order to have this plutonium appear as
an economy, whether it was in the United States. Whatever we
did, the world would, in fact, eventually do. And today, even
after all of these years of being out of the business, the
world still waits for us to make the decision on Generation IV,
to make the decisions on reprocessing, to make the decisions on
Yucca Mountain. I mean, with all deference to France and the
other countries making these choices, people are looking to us
for leadership in the future of nuclear energy.
Our position at APS and the position that is not in
controversy with anything that has been said here, the
technical information about the processes, the work of the
Department in trying to pursue it, Matt's comments about it, I
mean, we all--we would agree with many of these. We represent
44,000 physicists, and you can probably not get two of them to
have the same opinion on anything. But where they divide on the
business of plutonium is simple. They believe that if this
plutonium appears in the economy, one group believes that it is
so unattractive that it will never be made into a weapon. The
other group believes that it is explosive. From a physics point
of view, interestingly enough, they are both absolutely right.
You could make it into an explosive. On the other hand, no
country sophisticated enough to do that, in my judgment, would
ever choose to use that material for a weapons program. But we
face the important decision, and you face the decision, that we
can make all of the technical decisions about waste and
reprocessing, and there will be good decisions. The Department
of Energy will do good research, and laboratories like Argonne
will provide good technologies. But if you wish to avoid
another West Valley, if you wish to have a robust leadership of
nuclear energy that will last for 30 or 40 years, the issue of
proliferation has got to be central in the decision about
whether to go forward. And these technologies not only have to
be robust, there has to be a consensus in this country that
they are, because what we do, the rest of the world will take
as leadership. Thank you.
Dr. Finck. Yes, I want to make five comments. And the first
one is one of the most important one. And Madame Chairwoman
made the right comment that we need to have a systems look at
this issue. If when you look at the trees, we will forget to
look at the forest. And the ``forest'' here is our future. The
future where we need to have energy sources. We need to have a
total look and integrate a nuclear energy system that needs to
deal with its waste, needs to deal with its resources.
And my second comment is about--is to Mr. Bunn about the
UREX+ technology. The UREX+ can actually lure you to do a co-
separation of all of the transuranics. When we talk about
proliferation resistance, we should actually not concentrate on
what the separation technology is, but on where the recycle
technology is for the following reasons. Thermal reactors for
physics reasons need relatively pure products. You can not
recycle fission products in thermal reactors, for example.
Therefore, it is difficult to put dirty products, or
proliferation-resistant products, back in a thermal reactor.
The first reactor--pure physics reasons that we cannot change--
can take much dirtier product. So the issue of proliferation
resistance should be put on the level of what reactors you want
to use, what spectrum we are going to use. I mean, it is a real
physics question.
My third comment is on safeguards, and I absolutely agree
with what Dr. Hagengruber has been saying. We are at a stage
where we today can make major impacts on what we are doing with
new technologies having developed new computing technologies,
new modeling capabilities, and we can really change the future
drastically there to avoid any risk of diversion of misuse of
any plant.
Comment number four on economics. Again, we should not look
at a tree. We need to look at the forest. We need to do a full
life cycle analysis for the economics of the nuclear system.
The disposal part of the disposal component of the nuclear fuel
cycle is only a few percent, changing the cost of a few percent
by even 50 percent might not be that important in view of the
benefits we can get out of that change.
Lastly, a comment on research and development. I think this
country in the last four or five years, I have been here about
eight years, and we have made major progress in nuclear R&D. We
have basically come from a place where there was not much going
to a place where we can be the leaders of the world. But the
objective here is not to be a leader of the world in R&D. The
objective, to me, is very different. We are going to need
nuclear power, because we are going to need clean energy.
Global warming is probably a very major concern. Energy
security is a concern. We are going to need to build these
reactors. What I would like, personally, is to build them with
U.S. technology in U.S. plants by creating high-tech U.S. jobs.
It is important that we do this R&D so that the plants are
fabricated here and we don't import them from elsewhere.
Thank you.
Chairwoman Biggert. Thank you. Thank you very much.
And I will recognize myself for five minutes.
Dr. Finck's testimony points out that the technology
decisions link to reactor design and fuel cell choices. How is
the Department coordinating a decision on reprocessing with the
decisions for a next generation nuclear plant design,
transmutation, technology, and overall fuel cycle choices? Are
you working with industry on these choices?
Mr. Johnson. Thank you. With respect to the future and the
linkage between our advanced reactor technology development
program and our advanced fuel cycle program, those two programs
are actually very much intertwined where we have laboratory
personnel across the complex working cooperatively across
laboratory boundaries with one another, such as Argonne, Idaho,
Los Alamos working together. The decisions that we are making
with respect to the Generation IV reactor technologies, those
decisions are being made in the context of the fuel
technologies and recycle technologies that are being
investigated or are under investigation within the advanced
fuel cycle program. So it is very much a very well integrated
activity. We are working in the Generation IV program on an
international basis so that it also brings in our international
laboratory partners in France, Japan, and others. So the
decisions--it is, at this point, very early in the Generation
IV reactor development, actually the fuels program, I believe
rightly so, is leading the reactor development, trying to look
at what type of reactor fuels are best for getting to the key
issues of minimization of waste generation, maximizing the
transmutation of the various waste products within an existing
fuel cycle for a Generation IV program. We have much work left
to do, don't get me wrong, but the--with respect to the
execution of the Department's advanced reactor and fuel cycle
program, it is highly integrated from top to bottom, both in
the federal staff, laboratory staff. You asked with respect to
the industry participation, we probably do not have as much
industry participation as we could. The commercial industry
today is focused on the near-term deployment, looking through
our Nuclear Power 2010 program getting plants built in the
next, you know, five- to 10-year time frame whereas the work we
are doing in our advanced fuel cycle engine programs are
longer-term looking 20 to 30 years out.
Thank you.
Chairwoman Biggert. One of the big differences, it seemed
like, in particularly, France where the--it is a government
subsidy, really, to operate these plants, which is a big
difference than we have in the United States.
Mr. Johnson. Yes, ma'am.
Chairwoman Biggert. Then Dr. Finck, how long would it take
Argonne or another DOE lab to develop a detailed engineering
system of the fuel cycle, including the economics, the waste,
proliferation-resistant, and general safety and security
characteristics? I mean, is anyone working on such a model now?
Dr. Finck. Yes. We are actually working in collaboration
with all of other labs, including Idaho, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge,
I think, yes, on the systems analysis. And I think we have been
doing this for, now, three years in an integrated manner. We
have made a lot of progress where I would say by 2007, which is
a deadline that comes up often, and even maybe before, we
already have many of the technical answers. I think we are in
the stage of integrating them and we look at the systems. And
so 2007 seems to me with a focused effort to be absolutely
reachable.
Chairwoman Biggert. Well, I seem to recall, since I have
been on this committee and since I have been in Congress, that
you have been working on EMT and pyroprocessing and things that
it seems like it is not something new that has just come up
this year that we are planning on doing.
Dr. Finck. Yes, indeed. Many of the technologies we have
put through these systems are relatively mature and the
technical answers are well understood.
Chairwoman Biggert. Yeah, and it is true that France is
really operating on a system that really was developed years
and years ago. Is it 30 years or so that----
Dr. Finck. Well, I think the PUREX technology was first
published integrally in 1957. I mean, this is a well-known
technology, which is quite accessible. I think the book was
published in 1957, if I recall. So they are using many of the
technologies--actually U.S. technologies that we exploited----
Chairwoman Biggert. That is what they told us that they
have gotten them from----
Dr. Finck. These are extremely well known, and then they
improved them after--of course, after they acquired them. For
example, one of the big improvements is to reduce the volume of
waste by a factor of about four in the last 10 or 15 years. So
there have been major incremental changes, but the basis is
roughly the same. Yes.
Chairwoman Biggert. And then are the safeguards in
monitoring research and development part of Argonne's research
program?
Dr. Finck. We do very little bit of it. I think the places
that have real expertise would be places like Los Alamos. But I
think what is important is to integrate the research we do on
separations and reactors with the research done in other labs.
If we run these research programs in parallel, we have had good
discussion with--certainly with integration. I think here is
key.
Chairwoman Biggert. Thank you very much.
My time has expired.
And I will recognize Mr. Matheson from Utah for five
minutes.
Mr. Matheson. Thank you, Madame Chairwoman.
Mr. Johnson, in your testimony on page four, you state that
a commercial scale-up of spent fuel technologies could be
accomplished relatively rapidly if existing domestic facilities
could be modified and used. What--which facilities were you
talking about in terms of where are they and who owns those
facilities?
Mr. Johnson. I apologize. I am not able to recall the exact
three locations. I would be more than happy to answer that
question in writing, but off the top of my head, I don't want
to give you the wrong answer.
Mr. Matheson. No, that is okay. All right.
How--when you look at how DOE is looking at selecting a
reprocessing technology, you know, this is coming back on Mr.
Honda's line of questioning a little bit in terms of as we move
forward, the direction you have been given now, do we need to
change the policy direction we have given you as Congress in
terms of how you are going about your research and development
in terms of looking at developing new technologies? What do you
think? Do you need more flexibility? Do you need more
direction? Or are you happy with the current circumstance?
Mr. Johnson. I believe we are very happy with the current
policy and direction that we have. We have tried to lay out a
reasoned, logical process for stepping through various
laboratory investigations in stepping, again, through looking
at what technologies, whether it is a UREX+ type process,
whether it is a crystallization process, a volatilization
process. So there are--we do have several processes that have
been--being investigated at the laboratory scale. Again, it
just takes some time to take and develop these technologies,
refine them in the laboratory, and then make decisions based on
the technical data that has generated in moving and making a
selection to move up a technology into a larger scale
experiment. So what--one thing we are trying to do is to walk
through the investigation of the issues and the potential
treatment technologies and then make a sound technical decision
of how we take those from the smallest investigation in the
laboratory scale and scale-up the technologies to whether it is
the next step up, an engineering scale, and that what would
ultimately be used as the basis for a decision to move forward
for a commercial-scale application. I mean, for example, we are
currently looking at spent fuel on the order of kilograms of
spent fuel material in the laboratory that if you did it for a
year, it would be--but what we are talking about in a
commercial scale would be, you know, thousands of metric tons.
So we are--very small-scale work going on right now.
Mr. Matheson. In your testimony, you also said the
development of advanced fuel treatment technologies would
improve repository capacity. Do you have an estimate of how
much repository capacity would be increased under the different
reprocessing options you are looking at right now?
Mr. Johnson. An exact number, no. The--for example, uranium
constitutes about 90 percent--96 percent of the mass in
commercial spent fuel. So the--a process such as a UREX+
process that would take out the uranium would see a resulting
reduction in the mass of heavy metal needing to go into a
repository by an equivalent amount. But we are talking--but the
issue in the repository isn't just volume. It is a heat
generation. It is----
Mr. Matheson. Right.
Mr. Johnson. There are other constituents in the spent
fuel, both in near-term, such as strontium, which is really a
near-term heat issue, and then the longer-term heat issue
associated with americium. So it is really the--it is a complex
problem, multi-faceted. It is both a volume issue as well as a
heat-generation issue. And the heat-generation issue, I
believe, as Dr. Finck said, if really addressed, by taking it
from the next step of the reprocessing and then the destruction
of these higher actinides in a fast reactor system.
Mr. Matheson. Thanks.
I yield back, Madame Chairman.
Chairwoman Biggert. Thank you.
Now we will hear from our resident--one of our resident
physicists, Mr. Bartlett, for five minutes.
Mr. Bartlett. I am a physiologist rather than a physicist.
The physicist is sitting to my right.
I get very different estimates as to the world's supply of
economically recoverable fuel for light wire reactors. Could
each of you tell me, in terms of years at present use rates,
what you understand that supply to be? It is not infinite.
Mr. Johnson. No, sir, it is not infinite, as all our
resources are not necessarily infinite. There have been some
studies that have been produced, both within the Department and
outside of the Department, and as you can imagine, they come up
with different numbers. Those numbers have gone--range anywhere
from--there is, you know, a 50- to 100-year supply of uranium
around the globe to the fact that, you know, there is a 1,000-
year supply. So there really is no firm, strong agreement with
respect to the energy resources available in the uranium ore
around the globe, but the range--again, the range is anywhere
from, you know, 50 to 100 years to 1,000 years.
Mr. Bartlett. Mr. Bunn.
Mr. Bunn. Yes, this--we have--in the Harvard study that I
mentioned, there is an extensive appendix on this subject. The
range of estimates comes from, I think, in part, differences of
understanding of the terms by which the estimates are
described. Very often, people refer to reserves, which is a
term really used to describe, basically, uranium that you have
actually struck a pick to, as though that were all of the
uranium in the world, as opposed to resources, which is the
amount of uranium that might be available in the future as
technology develops and more uranium is found and so on. The
reality is, because of, until very recently, very low prices
for decades for uranium, there has been very little searching
for uranium, particularly at higher prices than existed for the
last couple of decades. And as a result, it seems certain to
those who have looked at it in detail, I think, that there is a
lot more uranium out there than is currently reported as
reserves.
Mr. Bartlett. What is currently reported as reserves?
Mr. Bunn. Currently, the--let us see. The red book, which
is the IAE document, suggests that there is something of the
order of several million tons that are--there is basically 17.1
million tons of uranium available at prices in the range of $40
to $80 a kilogram of uranium, which is----
Mr. Bartlett. Which is how many years' supply?
Mr. Bunn. Let us see. That would be a couple of century's
worth----
Mr. Bartlett. Okay.
Mr. Bunn.--at current rates, but, of course, if you expect
nuclear energy to grow in the future, which I think many people
in this room hope that it will, then, of course, you know,
that--the amount of material used every year would grow. But
the--that is what is sort of reported so far. And the reality
is, as I said, there is a lot more out there. And particularly
as you develop improved mining technology in the future, the
record on, essentially, every mineral that is mined, if you
look, over the past century or so, the price in real terms of
extraction, rather than increasing as the good stuff gets mined
out, has been decreasing because the technology has been
developing faster than the good stuff gets mined out. And I
would expect that to occur for uranium in the future as well.
Mr. Bartlett. Let me ask you each very quickly to tell me
how your testimony might have been different if you knew oil
was going to be $100 a barrel next year.
Mr. Johnson. I can guarantee you my testimony would not
change.
Mr. Bunn. I can guarantee you exactly the same, because as
I say, I believe in the future of nuclear energy, and I believe
the future of nuclear energy is best assured by not making a
near-term decision to reprocess.
Dr. Hagengruber. And my testimony would have been unaltered
as well.
Dr. Finck. My testimony would even be more optimistic. We
need more nuclear power, certainly. But we also need ways to
use nuclear power to fuel our cars. We don't have these ways
today.
Mr. Bartlett. Well, I hope there is a lot of additional
uranium remaining in the world, because I suspect, as we run
down Hubbard's Peak, we are going to need it.
Thank you very much, Madame Chairman.
Chairwoman Biggert. Thank you.
The gentleman from South Carolina, Mr. Inglis, is
recognized for five minutes.
Mr. Inglis. Thank you, Madame Chairman.
In South Carolina, you know, we have some sites that have
done some work on reprocessing spent fuel from weapons used at
Savannah River Site, and also some at Barnwell, South Carolina.
If we went to a reprocessing approach, how attractive would
those sites be as places to do that work? Mr. Johnson,
particularly you. Could you comment on that?
Mr. Johnson. Yes, sir. Thank you.
The sites that you noted would be, I would expect, part of
the evaluation that the Department would conduct as part of any
national environmental policy act review that we would be
required to undertake before moving forward with any kind of
large scale demonstration. So I would say pretty confidently
that those sites would be among the list of sites that would be
evaluated for such a future use.
Mr. Inglis. Let us see--other countries, and I have been at
a markup, so I am not sure whether this has already been
addressed, but other countries, Japan, France, England, Germany
have all pursued reprocessing. And Mr. Johnson, do you have any
comments about the success of their programs and what we can
learn from those?
Mr. Johnson. Yes. I believe that in those countries where
reprocessing technologies have been used in support of their
domestic commercial nuclear power plant operation, they have
been successful, with success being defined as the ability to
safely and securely separate spent fuel into its constituent
parts, refabricate fuel for use for power production. And in
that case, I would say yes, the programs have been very
successful. And there is no reason to think that the same type
of success could not be seen elsewhere as well.
Mr. Inglis. Mr. Bunn, do you agree with that or----
Mr. Bunn. I don't. If you define it in purely technical
terms, they eventually manage to become successful, although in
both France and Britain and particularly in Japan now they had
tremendous difficulties with cost and startup problems and so
on at these reprocessing plants. But if you look at the
official government studies in both France and Japan, they
conclude that their nuclear energy is noticeably more
expensive--because they have pursued reprocessing--than it
would have been had they not done so. And that is not me saying
that. That is the official government studies in both of those
countries saying that. And so it is hard for me to characterize
that as a success when an alternative technology of dry cask
storage would have provided nuclear energy with a way to manage
its fuel more cheaply, more safely, and more securely.
Mr. Inglis. Dr. Finck, do you agree or disagree with that?
Dr. Finck. Well, I absolutely disagree, if I may. And I
used to be French years ago, and I would characterize--it is
not the case anymore, but I still have a little bit of pride
left.
First of all, I think the French program, in my mind, has
been incredibly successful. They did meet their objective. They
know how to deal with their waste. And it is true their reports
say there were small costs associated with closing--that cost
is very small. And in view of the benefit they are getting out
of it, they have accepted that small cost. I mean, nothing is
free in life. Where I live, we recycle our household things,
and I pay a cost to the city to recycle, so I think it is well
worth it in view of the benefits of not having to bury it in my
own backyard. So I--you know, as a society, we have to take
into account not only the small cost increase but the whole
benefits. I think the French programs, I view those as having
been extremely successful. And the demonstration of success is
that they have not decided to stop. If it weren't worth it,
they would not go on. They are doing it. And they will
continue, I believe.
Mr. Inglis. Germany, however, has suspended their program,
right?
Dr. Finck. Germany has suspended. Basically, they are going
to--they want to suspend their whole nuclear program. They want
to shut down all of their nuclear plants; therefore they don't
want to do anything, no nuclear energy, no reprocessing, et
cetera. This is a----
Mr. Bunn. But they decided to stop reprocessing before they
decided to shut down----
Dr. Finck. Yes, let me finish. This is a political
decision. My only question will be in 2015 and 2020, where will
they get their electricity? They might have a real problem.
They might import it across the French boundary using reactors
and using reprocessing. They just happen to be down on the
other side of the Rhine River, which two--the bottom line would
be the same effect.
Mr. Inglis. My time has expired.
Thank you, Madame Chairman.
Chairwoman Biggert. Thank you.
The gentleman from Indiana, Mr. Sodrel.
Mr. Sodrel. I don't have any questions at this time. Thank
you. We don't have any nuclear power plants in Indiana. We do
have a lot of coal.
Chairwoman Biggert. The gentleman from Michigan, Mr.
Schwarz.
Mr. Schwarz. I want to make sure that I am getting this
correct, and Mr. Bunn, I guess you would be the one that I
would like to have answer this, so anyone else jump in, if you
feel like it.
You feel that the--we should not proceed to build any sort
of reprocessing facility in this country now, that we should
continue the open fuel cycle, storing the waste product, and
that when we do, hopefully soon, start building new nuclear
power plants, that is the technology that would be--that should
be used, and if we go to the reprocessing and recycling, that
would put off, significantly into the future, any expansion of
the number of nuclear power plants we have in the United
States. Do I have that right?
Mr. Bunn. Except for the last bit. I think my argument is
not that it would inevitably put off construction of new power
plants, but that it would make--because of the increased
complexity of cost, safety issues, and so on, it would make
public acceptance and utility acceptance of new power plants
somewhat more problematic to achieve.
Mr. Schwarz. You led right into my next observation and
question.
What is the position of the investor-owned regulated
utilities in this country who potentially would build these new
plants? What is their position on the issue of the open fuel
cycle versus using reprocessed and recycled fuel?
Mr. Bunn. You would not be able to find a utility in the
country who--that is willing to pay the cost of reprocessing
its spent nuclear fuel or who would be interested in investing
in a reprocessing plant today.
Mr. Schwarz. So for anyone on the panel, then, if we are
going to--if there is a need to build new nuclear power plants,
and I believe there is, the sooner the better, in my opinion,
why would we be considering building any sort of a reprocessing
recycling facilities or be pushing that technology now when it
is not a technology we are going to use?
Dr. Hagengruber. Let me just venture a comment here.
I--the industry--I can't speak for the industry, and I
don't think any of us here can speak for the industry itself.
But what I have heard from the industry would lead me to
believe that the number one priority that they have, as far as
nuclear energy is concerned, is to get a new reactor licensed
and get something under construction in this country, a plan
for one or several reactors. I think part of the industry that
builds reactors would like to also sell a reactor to China and
have some influence on that process.
I think the number two thing is they would like to get
something done on the waste, that they don't want to watch
another licensing period go on without some hope. So whether it
is interim storage of waste or dry cask storage at an interim
site or Yucca Mountain, and there, one of the issues they would
like to see is something, you know, that would lead them to
believe that this 100,000-year standard, which is, you know,
the--gotten into the way of Yucca Mountain, somehow that will
be dealt with. I think in the case of the reprocessing, it is
so far off in the future that from an economic horizon point of
view, as businesses, they have to look at the issues of the
reliability of the Federal Government to have a regulatory
environment that allows them to predict cost so that they can
transition over interest rates. And I think the last thing is
not reprocessed fuel. I mean, I think technically they are
interested in all of these questions, but I think it is really
beyond the scope of them as a business, but we are, in fact,
going to use some fuel from the nuclear weapons program, and I
think they would like to actually see that successfully done
and like to see a process that would actually burn these fuels,
because before you start believing that these are going to have
a major influence on the business you are in, you would like to
really believe that there will be a business that will be
predictable from a cost point of view. And so when I talk with
the industry people, they are always very courteous about
Generation IV and reprocessing. But it is really not on the
horizon of the time that they are going to be in charge of the
business.
Mr. Schwarz. Thank you, sir.
I yield back, Madame Chairman.
Chairwoman Biggert. Thank you.
I might note that we will be having a hearing later on
focusing on the utilities and having them here.
And also, the utilities do pay a fee to the Nuclear Trust
Fund, and that is what provides for the waste, and that is why
the Federal Government takes over at that point.
I would like to recognize the gentlelady from Texas, Ms.
Jackson Lee, for five minutes.
Ms. Jackson Lee. Thank you very much, Madame Chairperson,
and to the Ranking Member.
I can't imagine, even in the calmness and quietness of this
room, that there could not be a more important hearing to talk
about reconfiguring how we deal with nuclear waste,
particularly when we mention a favorite President of mine,
Jimmy Carter, but that you can describe his legacy as decades
ago. And certainly, nuclear waste is not something that should
be described in the concept of decades ago.
And so I would--I just would like to focus on the vitality
of the question of reprocessing spent fuel. When I say the
vitality, the good things that can happen by doing that. And
then I would like to also--and I would like each of the
witnesses to comment on that, since our friends in Japan and
France have seemingly already done that. Those of us in Texas
are still mourning the loss of a superconductivity lab, which
is a parallel, not necessarily in sync with this, but new
technology.
At the same time, I would like to wear the hat of the many
concerned persons about the danger of nuclear waste, and of
course, as was noted in some of the information, the concern
about PUREX, but also the concern about the potential of
weapons. And some of my colleagues may have asked this
question. I was interestingly just in a meeting on homeland
security, and so I apologize for not hearing the totality of
your testimony. But I would like to hear a balanced response of
the answer back on the potential threat of the creation of
terrorist weapons, but the vitality of doing this processing of
finding a creative way to advise the Administration, meaning
Congress to advise the Administration, or set policies and
standards on how we do this.
Let me also say that this question is in the backdrop of a
great deal of concern and opposition that comes from both sides
of the aisle with any traveling of nuclear waste, and certainly
the concern that Nevadians have expressed, or persons from
Nevada, in their utilization right now as to the storage place
of nuclear waste.
So my first question, the vitality of reprocessing this
nuclear waste, the way that we can answer the question
regarding the ability of terrorists accumulating or using this
for weapons, and then guidance that might be helpful now
decades later in a policy that would be effective in providing
a way to transport and also to, if you will, handle nuclear
waste.
I could start with Mr. Johnson.
Mr. Johnson. Thank you.
Before I start, let me just reiterate that the
Administration stands firmly behind Yucca Mountain and the need
to proceed as expeditiously as possible with the completion and
the opening of that facility, and that the talk that we are--
the work that we are engaged in at the Department and the
investigation of recycle reprocessing technologies is looked at
as complementary to that activity.
Ms. Jackson Lee. And may I just, for a moment, so I can
make the record, there are many of us that don't stand behind
that, but we are certainly interested in the complementary part
being more than a complementary part and maybe being a fixed
part. But let me hear your answer to the complementary part.
Some of us are in disagreement with the Administration's
position on Yucca Mountain. But you may proceed.
Mr. Johnson. Thank you.
Yes, well, we are very much committed to continuing to
investigate the possibilities that exist in treating spent
fuel, not necessarily as a pure waste, but looking at what kind
of energy content--the energy content that it has, how can we
recapture that, how can we minimize the waste burden on future
generations through the need--or through the positive impacts
in geologic disposal.
With respect to the commercial viability of the
technologies, we are not there yet. We are continuing to work
within the laboratories. Things look very promising at the
laboratory, on the laboratory scale. There are technologies, as
you know, being deployed and being in use worldwide. We think
we can improve upon those, that the investigations we have
going on within the Department are, we believe, vastly improved
technologies over what are being used commercially worldwide.
With respect to the--your question on security, as you
know, spent nuclear fuel is being stored at, roughly, 60
nuclear sites around the country. So there is a need to look at
the issue of where does the spent nuclear fuel reside, for how
long does it reside, and can there be some increased safety
assurances by consolidation to less than the number of sites
that are currently being used.
Ms. Jackson Lee. Yes. Can I get questions--answers from the
panelists? Thank you.
Mr. Bunn. I would argue that the reprocessing industry
today is not a very vital one, to use your words. British
Nuclear Fuels, which operates one of the world's largest
commercial reprocessing plants, has announced that they are
going to be out of the business in less than a decade, because
they simply don't have customers anymore. France is running out
of foreign customers, will continue its domestic reprocessing,
but will end up using significantly less than the total
reprocessing capacity that it has. Japan is about to open its
new reprocessing plant after a prolonged struggle in which the
utilities sort of tried without saying so publicly to get out
of having to pay for it and have now--are now talking to the
government about imposing a huge lines charge on all users of
electricity in order to pay the immense costs of reprocessing.
No other country is seriously thinking about getting into the
business. I should mention that Russia is struggling to keep
its last commercial reprocessing plant open, because it has so
little business, and the costs are so high.
So this is, in a sense, a dying industry that we are
thinking of joining here.
With respect to the terrorist risks, as I mentioned in my
testimony, there has not yet been a good, credible study, a
life cycle comparison of the terrorist risks of the once-
through fuel cycle versus reprocessing and recycling. But if
you just look at the situation, it is--the National Academy of
Sciences, and others, have concluded that the risk of terrorist
attack on a thick dry cask is very modest. The risk of a
terrorist attack on fuel in a pool is somewhat more,
particularly if the fuel is fresh enough that there is
potential for a fire if the water is drained. But when you are
processing the--you know, in this kind of intensely radioactive
material, in huge facilities with volatile chemicals, often at
high temperatures, there are more potentials for accident or
for dispersing that radioactive material than there are if it
is just sitting in a thick steel or concrete cask. And
similarly, then you are going to be--for the transportation
part, you are going to be shipping some pretty radioactive
stuff from place to place in order to send it to the
transmutation reactors, and that will require significant
investments in security.
More broadly, with respect to actual nuclear weapons
terrorism, I hope that we will not proceed with any technology
that won't be reasonably resistant against theft of nuclear
material for that purpose, although I have some doubts about
some of the technologies we are looking at now. But the
traditional approach to reprocessing involves a huge number of
shipments of directly weapons-usable plutonium from place to
place every year. And those--you know, the part of the nuclear
materials life cycle, when it is most vulnerable to sort of
overt, forcible theft, is when it is being shipped from place
to place.
As I mentioned in my testimony, there is a problem
worldwide with security and accounting for nuclear stockpiles,
both nuclear warheads and nuclear material that could be used
to make a nuclear bomb. Regardless of what we do about
reprocessing, our government needs to step up its efforts very
substantially to make sure that every kilogram of plutonium,
every kilogram of highly-enriched uranium, every nuclear
warhead worldwide, wherever it may be, is secure and accounted
for, because our homeland security starts there. It starts
wherever there is a vulnerable cache of nuclear material
anywhere in the world that terrorists might use for a nuclear
attack.
Chairwoman Biggert. The gentlelady's time has expired. If
the next two witnesses could give very short answers, please.
Ms. Jackson Lee. I thank the Chairwoman.
Dr. Hagengruber. I will only address one part of it. I
spent my whole career on issues relating to security, nuclear
security. I have done many security studies, including 9/11
studies for the Department of Energy, their facilities. So let
me address this in particular.
The worst places in the fuel cycle are the reactor, as the
National Academy Report on Terrorism said, would be something
happening at the reactor, because there is a lot of energy
stored there. It can be dealt with.
The other place is when fissile material, that is plutonium
or highly-enriched uranium, which is weapon-like materials,
appear. Plutonium is particularly bad, because when you scatter
it about, it costs an enormous amount of money to clean it up.
I would disagree with my colleague, Matt Bunn, on the business
about weapon-useable, because many of these things, unless they
are really fuel grade, the plutonium's biggest risk is this
dispersal risk. It is not easy to make a weapon out of it. Even
in fuel grade, weapons--it is just very hard to make that. So
just--my view of this is the reprocessing opens a door up for
plutonium to be available in transport.
And here I would agree with them that, in fact, opens this
risk up. And so it needs to be done with the greatest of care
in terms of looking at--over at that overall system or there
will be another panel like this meeting on that issue.
Thank you.
Dr. Finck. I will try to answer very quickly.
As far as terrorist use, I think there are many options
today for increasing proliferation resistance. We have heard
them. The bottom line, to me, is to never separate pure
weapons-useable material, and we can do that. Therefore, we
never have to ship it, and it won't be very attractive to
potential terrorists.
As far as vitality, Shane Johnson made a very good point.
Yucca Mountain is needed whatever we do. And what we are trying
to do is making better use of the one Yucca Mountain we might
have soon. So we raise a real complementary effort between
repository work and transmutation work.
Finally, for the question of vitality in Europe Mr. Bunn
addressed, I think the issue is not deciding to go out of
reprocessing. Several countries have decided to go out of
nuclear in Europe, therefore, they are not doing reprocessing
anymore. When the time comes, and I think it is now, where
energy costs are going up and the gentleman asked the question
of the cost of oil at $100, when that time comes, nuclear, I
believe, will be reborn in Europe and many other countries, and
the fuel cycle will have to follow, because they will need as
much as I know. They will try to avoid having to build many
repositories in the countries that are very dense.
Ms. Jackson Lee. Thank you.
Chairwoman Biggert. Thank you.
The gentleman from Alabama, Mr. Bonner, is recognized.
Mr. Bonner. Thank you, Madame Chair, and this is a very
timely conversation, I agree.
Mr. Bunn, you say in your testimony that there is little
doubt that Yucca Mountain could hold far more than the current
legislative limit, perhaps even all of the waste produced over
the life of the existing nuclear fleet. Why are you so
confident of Yucca Mountain's ability to hold more waste? And
would this require an expansion of the repository? And if so,
would you be willing to venture a guess of what it costs?
Mr. Bunn. Well, the costs of the repository are not--it is
only a very minor portion of those costs that are related to
digging more tunnels. And I am confident in part because my
colleagues, Mr. Johnson and Dr. Finck, have both published
reports that indicate that their view of the technical limit is
120,000 tons of heavy metal, as opposed to 70,000, which is the
legislative limit. But I--the reality is that the Department
hasn't really looked at the subject in the--of how you could go
about expanding that capacity in any significant detail. For
example, there are--you can go outward in some directions until
you get to the edges of the areas that have sufficient geologic
stability to deal with that situation. You can think about
whether it is possible to have a second or a third tier,
because currently it is just one tier, a flat repository. I
have talked to a number of analysts within the Yucca Mountain
program who think it is quite plausible that you could do a
second or a third tier. So there are a variety of things that,
as I said in my testimony, need to be looked at in more detail.
The American Physical Society Panel that Dr. Hagengruber
chaired also talked about the potential that it could hold all
of the fuel from the existing nuclear fleet.
I should also mention, with respect to other countries, the
United States is, I believe, the only country that has made the
mistake of locating its repository in a mountain with fixed
sides. In most other countries, they are looking at giant
blocks of granite that you could put centuries of spent fuel
into simply by extending the size of the tunnel. So it is, in
most countries, not an issue of having to build, you know, lots
and lots and lots of Yucca Mountains all of the time.
I should also mention, in respect to Dr. Hagengruber's
disagreement with me, it is not just my view. It is the
published view of the U.S. Government in a report sited in my
prepared testimony. It is also--was gone through in some
considerable detail in a report of the National Academy of
Sciences that included the former Director of Lawrence
Livermore Laboratory, a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, and so on, among its panelists. So Roger and I can talk
about that more off-line after the hearing.
Mr. Bonner. If I could just ask the panel, anyone willing
to take a stab at this, hearing the questioning from the
gentlelady from Texas. In respect that there are many people
who have different views on Yucca Mountain, but as a Nation, we
are in an energy crisis, and we are depleting fossil fuels
faster than we are replenishing them, and we are more and more
dependent on foreign countries for energy. That would have to
be a problem that we could all agree to, and yet I sit back
sometimes, when I hear my friends who do not want to proceed
with Yucca Mountain and yet want the benefits of nuclear power,
and wonder, ``What are the other alternatives out there if we
don't proceed, as Chairman Hobson said before he left, with the
plan that we have in front of us?'' Are there other reasonable
plans out there that can allow us to continue down the path of
pursuing nuclear but being responsible with what we do with its
waste?
Mr. Bunn. To me?
Mr. Bonner. To any of the four of you.
Mr. Bunn. Ultimately, we are going to need a nuclear waste
repository. We are going to need that whether we go direct
disposal or whether we pursue reprocessing and transmutation.
That is clear. There isn't--unfortunately for Ms. Jackson Lee,
there isn't an alternative to a nuclear waste repository.
There--one could potentially cancel the Yucca Mountain and try
to find a different nuclear waste repository. My own view is
that that would--the prospects of political success in
licensing a different nuclear waste repository somewhere in the
United States before I retire are probably pretty modest.
Mr. Bonner. Anyone else disagree?
Dr. Finck. I would like to answer that.
With the technology we have discussed today, we have a path
towards sustainability on energy security in the United States
by--we will need the repository, certainly, but we will need a
unique repository where we will use it much better than we plan
to use it today. It will last us well beyond this century. So
there are ways to make nuclear much more sustainable than what
we are doing today.
Dr. Hagengruber. I would like to just offer a comment on
that.
I--that was the first study I did back in 1972. And at the
time, we were classifying separated waste from reprocessing at
Hanford. We were also doing work at Savannah River Site. And
there was waste being stored in tanks in Idaho. It was very
obvious, at the time, that engineered storage, which is storage
that might be monitored--retrievable storage that might be
monitored for hundreds of years into the future as a concept
with something that was not hard to do, that trying to get a
solution that would meet people's acceptable standard of
permanent disposal with no chance of anything ever being
returned to the environment was too hard. It is just as hard,
in fact, it is even worse now, because the legal barriers to
making any kind of progress are higher. The prospect--you know,
I don't know how you will deal with the 100,000-year standard.
It is too ice age for--and we don't know of any technology that
is going to survive that. So practically speaking, I think a
permanent disposal repository for nuclear waste is something
that probably 30 years from now, somebody will be sitting here
talking about the same thing, because it still hasn't happened.
I think that what people will have to face is that we have very
poor interim intermediate storage capabilities by using
reactors as places to store stuff. We need to get on with the
business of accepting the fact that it is not 100,000 years
later some guy with a burrow digging a hole in the ground is
going to be the measure whether we did a good job on permanent
storage. But the fight over Yucca Mountain is a fight that
existed, by the way, very strongly in the 1970s, but for
different things. It wasn't Yucca Mountain then. It was deep-
sea beds and granitic disposal, glass rods. It was the same
kind of arguments you see today. It is 30 years later, and we
still haven't made any progress. I am not a cynic, but I guess,
realistically, I have--a physicist that has become an engineer.
I would just get on with the job of some regional intermediate
storage with dry cask storage and just expect to take care of
it for the rest of our existence.
Mr. Bonner. Thank you, Madame Chair.
Chairwoman Biggert. Thank you.
The gentleman from Missouri, Mr. Akin, is recognized.
Mr. Akin. Thank you, Madame Chair.
I had a bunch of questions, and I hope a couple of them
maybe have fairly short answers.
The first one was, somewhere or other I had heard that if
you were just volumetrically to take the spent nuclear fuel
that we have so far and stack it on a football field, it would
end up about a meter or so deep. I understand that, from a
thermal point of view, that wouldn't work very well, but just
volumetrically, if you stacked it on a football field, is that
about right? About a meter?
Mr. Bunn. I haven't done that calculation, but it sounds
like the right order of magnitude.
Mr. Akin. Reasonable? Okay.
The second question----
Mr. Bunn. It is not huge volumes of stuff, you know, but--
--
Mr. Akin. It generates a lot of heat, that is the----
Mr. Bunn. The total amount is less than, you know, the
waste from a coal power plant--one coal power plant every year.
Mr. Akin. Okay. The second question is the small,
inexpensive reactors possibly with--what generation would they
be? Third generation or fourth or what?
Mr. Bunn. Probably fourth.
Mr. Akin. Fourth generation? First of all, my question is,
are they available now, if we said, all of a sudden, we are so
sick of paying for this oil. We are just going to build them,
how long would it take us to get to the point where we would
actually start digging some dirt and pouring some concrete and
all?
Mr. Johnson. If you are referring to some of the small,
Generation IV reactor technologies that we have just begun,
essentially, conceptualizing, we are, you know, a decade or
more away from seeing any kind of commercialization of that
particular technology, although I would----
Mr. Akin. So those are the things that people talk about
that it is pelletized, kind of, in ceramic pellets and that
they are very small----
Mr. Johnson. Oh, you are talking about the pebble bed? The
pebble bed could be done somewhat sooner, potentially. There
are smaller, as Mr. Bunn has eluded to, what is called a pebble
bed, gas-cooled reactor technology that has been under
development both in Japan and South Africa predominately that
builds upon earlier German technologies. Those have been looked
at by U.S. industry recently, although there is no one in
industry currently pursuing that particular technology.
Mr. Akin. Would that be called third generation? Maybe?
Mr. Bunn. Probably.
Mr. Johnson. Probably.
Mr. Akin. Okay. So you are saying we are 10 years away, at
a minimum, from a small, fourth generation type of facility?
Mr. Johnson. At least, yes.
Mr. Akin. At least. Okay. If you had to build something
now, what would you build?
Mr. Johnson. Well, as you may know, the commercial industry
in this country is looking at the next generation light water
reactor technologies, which build off the technology base that
is currently deployed at 103 sites--or 103 reactors across our
country. So they are looking at, essentially, an evolution of
the current technology that is----
Mr. Akin. A further improvement of what we have already
had?
Mr. Johnson. Yes, sir.
Mr. Akin. Okay. Is that the same thing the Navy uses in
their different ships and all? The same general technology?
Mr. Johnson. The base technology of a pressurized reactor,
or a boiling water reactor, yes. But there are considerable
differences in fuel and the operation of those facilities.
Mr. Akin. Just because the nature of what they are trying
to accomplish is a lot different?
Mr. Johnson. Correct.
Mr. Akin. Okay. And now is it true that what you said that
depending on how you come out on reprocessing might change the
design somewhat of the power plant?
Mr. Johnson. Yes, what I was trying to address was the
Chairlady's question on the integration of our Generation IV
reactor program and our fuels development program that those
are integrated. They are interrelated. And it is an integrative
process of trying to optimize the fuel to meet both power
production requirements, waste minimization, and also enhances
proliferation resistance to----
Mr. Akin. So dry cask storage, that--would you take that
off of the table, if you were talking about reprocessing then
it may change your design parameter somewhat? Because if you
are dry cask storage, you could use whatever gives you the most
power out of the material and then you get rid of what is left
over, right?
Mr. Johnson. Yes, but I don't want to say that you would
not have, somewhere in the process, the need for dry cask
storage at some point in the process.
Mr. Akin. Okay. The third thing was--and this was a point,
I think, that you were making, Mr. Bunn, pretty heavily, and
that is this reprocessing cost can drive the thing out of
economic range. Relative to relative cost, and that was where,
I gather, you disagreed with Mr. Finck. You are saying it is a
relatively small cost and a responsible cost to add. Mr. Bunn,
you are saying it is just disproportionately so large it makes
it impractical. Better to postpone the problem until the
technology develops a little bit more. We can always come back
and catch it later at a lower cost. What is the relative cost
of the reprocessing in the overall process? Are we talking
about adding five percent or doubling the cost of electricity,
or what would be the effect on the cost of electricity to the
consumer if----
Mr. Bunn. The effect on the cost of electricity, actually
Dr. Finck and I don't disagree, is relatively modest, because
the advantage of nuclear power, when you look at--when you
compare it to other electricity sources, is that its whole fuel
cost is pretty modest, because the energy in its fuel is so
concentrated. So the main cost in nuclear energy is the capital
cost of the nuclear plant that you have built. And so the total
contribution to electricity generation costs would be
relatively modest, a few percent, probably, depending on how
expensive the reprocessing and the recycling ended up being.
But that is a little bit like saying, ``Well, I should be
willing to pay $300 rather than $100 for a pair of shoes,
because it is still a small proportion of the cost of my
wardrobe.'' And the reality is, if you look at the cost of
nuclear waste management, which is one of the few costs that
the owner of a nuclear power plant that is already built can
still control going forward, you are, of order, doubling that
cost of nuclear waste management, if you are going forward with
reprocessing and recycling, as traditionally practiced, using
the cost--you know, if we had a plant that was government-
financed at low cost, and if it had the same--managed to
achieve the same capital and operating costs as the most
efficient plants that exist today in France and Britain. So you
know, a utility is not going to want to do that. So they--if
left to the private market, reprocessing wouldn't happen. So
then, as I said, you have to do one of three things. You either
have to substantially increase the nuclear waste fee, which
utilities are going to scream bloody murder about, or you are
going to have to have the government provide tens of billions
of dollars in subsidies over decades, and you know, while it is
a small contribution to electricity, tens of billions of
dollars is significant money. If we were talking about a
weapons system, we would agree that that was an expensive
weapons system. Or third, you are going to have to impose
regulations that force the industry to take it out of their own
bottom line and build these facilities themselves.
Mr. Akin. And let me just stop you for a minute. Somehow or
another there was a little leap here of reasoning that I didn't
catch. Okay. What I was asking was, let us say--first of all,
let us start with the assumption that the government is not
going to subsidize anything. We are just going to try to keep
the lawyers at bay and the politics at bay and let us just deal
with it just from an engineering--let us--a perfect world.
Mr. Bunn. Right.
Mr. Akin. My question is, the total cost for generating,
obviously you have got to put the plant cost in and your cost
of capital to build it all. And so I am saying that is built
into the cost to the consumable electricity.
Mr. Bunn. Right.
Mr. Akin. What you are saying is the reprocessing is still
a small portion of----
Mr. Bunn. It is a small portion of that----
Mr. Akin.--the overall----
Mr. Bunn.--total cost.
Mr. Akin.--electrical establishment?
Mr. Bunn. Correct.
Mr. Akin. Okay.
Mr. Bunn. Correct. That is what I am saying. And what--all
I was saying, with respect to the regulations or the fee was
how do we make that money for that small additional cost
appear. You have got to either charge the utilities for it or
force them to pay for it themselves or the government has to
pay for it itself. Those are the only three options I can think
of anyway.
Chairwoman Biggert. The gentleman's time has expired. We
will have a second round of questioning.
Mr. Akin. Thank you.
Chairwoman Biggert. We are experiencing technical
difficulties.
We will also be having a hearing on cost later on.
So the gentleman from Michigan, the physicist, Dr. Ehlers.
Mr. Ehlers. That puts a heavy burden on me.
I--it is interesting listening to this, because the first
in-depth look I took of this was in the late 1970s, slightly
after you did, Dr. Hagengruber. And it doesn't seem much has
changed. But I look at--I took a good look at this, because I
was teaching a course on the environment, and I was also a
member of the Sierra Club, which was adamantly opposed to
nuclear power. And so I looked very carefully at the various
forms of generating electricity and came to the conclusion that
nuclear power and fossil-generated power are about equally bad.
And I ended up disagreeing with the Sierra Club, which I was a
member then and still am, in spite of occasional difficulties
with them. I came down on the side of nuclear power, because
the base--the biggest problems that you had to deal with, with
the fossil-fueled plants, is the greenhouse gas effect. The
biggest problem of the nuclear plants is the disposal of the
radioactive waste. In other words, in both cases, dealing with
the waste products. And I felt much, much more comfortable
dealing with a compact, solid material that is a waste product
than a gaseous dispersed product, which is virtually impossible
to deal with capture, and we talk about a lot of solutions, but
none of them look as easy as either reprocessing or storage of
waste.
I would also pick up on Dr. Hagengruber's comment on the--I
am supposed to be at another meeting, so I am sure I am being
summoned.
Dr. Hagengruber's comment was about disposal versus
storage. And he is absolutely right. I got into politics
because of an environmental problem in my area. That was
ordinary, solid waste. And one of the things I proposed is that
we change the name of our landfill from the Kent County Solid
Waste Disposal Facility to the Kent County Solid Waste Storage
Facility, because it is still there. And it is still there and
it is still creating problems. And we have to recognize that.
Yucca Mountain, I think the legislative language that we put on
Yucca Mountain is just impossible to fulfill, and we ought to
wake up to that, and I have tried to wake my colleagues up to
that. Monitored, retrievable storage is the only viable
solution politically, because you can not guarantee that this
will--that if you just stick it in the ground and leave it
there it is never going to leak, never going to create
problems.
I always thought that recycling of waste was a good idea.
And Mr. Bunn, you seem to argue against it on, primarily,
economic grounds. I would point out, if there is that much
excess capacity in other parts of the world, I would be
perfectly happy to ship it over there and let them reprocess it
and pay for it.
The--I also would disagree, and this is because I have to
leave for another meeting. I am not--I am just stating my
opinions here and will not--probably not have time to listen to
your responses, but the economic argument, I don't think, is a
valid one in this case. I find it hard to believe that the cost
of recycling the waste is going to be greater than the
perpetual care over the long-term of the stored waste, because
I think the only way to do it is to set up a trust fund to make
sure the money is always there, otherwise there are going to be
political hassles every year about the cost of that.
I would also point out that this is not a cost on the
utilities. It is a cost on the customers. We have been talking
about the utilities pay this fee that they are paying now. That
goes right into the rate base, and since they are mostly
regulated industries, it is the customers who really pay the
bill. And so I feel comfortable just--if, in fact, recycling is
a better alternative, I feel comfortable just telling the
customers that that is a fee that has to be paid as part of the
total cost of the system.
So I haven't quite exhausted my time. There are probably 30
seconds, if any of you would like to respond and argue with me
or say something different about it.
Mr. Bunn. Well, I would like to argue with you a bit. I
think that you and I are supporting the same option, which is
monitored retrievable storage. I believe that if we put the
fuel in storage while moving forward in a responsible way with
a geologic repository, that we are going to leave open whatever
option we take. Then we can allow time for technology to
develop. We can allow time for interest to accumulate on funds
that we set aside today. And I completely agree that the only
way to manage a geologic waste repository, which we are going
to need, again, no matter what path we take, is to set aside a
trust fund so that the money will always be available. But with
the wonders of compound interest, that is possible to do
without spending enormous amounts of money today.
So I think that that is really the best path forward: to
continue looking at the technology, but not to make a rush to
judgment today on technologies that currently are more
expensive, more risky, and more proliferation-prone than the
alternatives.
Mr. Ehlers. Okay. And I don't have that much argument with
that. Obviously, we have to know what we are going to do. But
I--the difficulty of siting, I think, is the biggest problem
with the storage system. And I think it is a large enough
problem that recycling will have to--just so that you don't
have to cite as many sites. And the economics may not win in
this case. The politics may win.
Mr. Bunn. But then you have to site the reprocessing and
transmutation facilities, and since they will pose greater
hazards to their neighbors than a repository will, that may be
even more difficult.
Mr. Ehlers. Well, possibly, but I am not convinced that it
would pose greater hazards, if it is done properly. And after
all, we have two polluted sites we can start with and just
build a large perimeter fence around them and say, ``Okay. Keep
on doing it.'' But I don't--I think your view of the dangers is
somewhat exaggerated.
Madame Chairwoman, I appreciate your consideration, and I
yield back the balance of my time.
Chairwoman Biggert. Thank you very much, Mr. Ehlers.
And we will start a second round now. And Mr. Honda, why
don't you----
Mr. Honda. Madame Chairwoman, let me yield to Mr. Matheson,
please.
Mr. Matheson. Well, thank you, Mr. Honda.
The question I would like to ask about is in the evaluation
of reprocessing, I am assuming that there would--if we moved
ahead with the commercial effort of reprocessing at some point,
we would have it at a few sites around the country, or perhaps
fewer than a few?
Mr. Bunn. Maybe only one. Who knows?
Mr. Matheson. In terms of looking at all of this effort for
R&D and reprocessing, what effort is being looked at in
assessing the risk of transporting of the waste to another
site?
Mr. Bunn. Do you want to handle that?
Mr. Johnson. Well, with respect to our Advanced Fuel Cycle
Initiative, we are not looking at transportation issues.
Probably the only part of the Department that is looking at
transportation issues associated with spent nuclear fuel would
be the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, and to
their work, I apologize, but I can't really address.
Mr. Bunn. There is a fairly substantial R&D effort in the
Department related--not--I wouldn't say--R&D is the wrong word.
A fairly substantial effort to look into what measure should be
applied to secured transports of spent fuel, and there is a--
what is called the Transportation Safeguards Division within
DOE that today safeguards shipments such as how weapons are
shipped from place to place.
Mr. Matheson. It may be getting a little outside of the
scope of this hearing, but as a member of the Transportation
Committee, we held a hearing in Las Vegas talking about
transportation relative to moving waste to Yucca Mountain. I
was not given a lot of assurance that the Department has really
done a lot of work on assessing transportation risk of nuclear
waste, and so it would be an interesting issue to----
Mr. Bunn. I don't disagree with the--your assessment of the
adequacy of what has been done so far.
Mr. Matheson. Well, since I am from a state where 95
percent of that waste would go through, I have a certain
interest in this issue.
Dr. Hagengruber. Let me just speak, because on that--I
think people have said the right thing. The RW Office actually
is the one that is taking the responsibility for the security
aspects of transportation. There has been work done. I know,
because some of the work was done at--you know, involving
Sandia National Labs. Some of the work in the transportation
area, including the transportation of casks, for instance, fuel
casks and accidents that occur, the idea of people shooting
weapons at fuel casks or transport casks, that work goes back
25 or 30 years. So there is--if you look at the integrated
total of the amount of money that has gone into both purposeful
and accidental attacks on the transportation of fresh fuel and
spent fuel, there has been a lot of work, and we are talking
about many, many millions of dollars.
Now in particular, RW has been looking at--was looking at
the question of whether or not to federalize the transportation
or to make it commercial in its nature. Transportation Security
Division, one that Matt mentioned, transports, in effect,
trigger quantities of material weapons and pits and other types
of material. And it is a very, very expensive thing. The trucks
cost a couple of million dollars. They have a full cadre of
highly trained, armed forces with them. They have constant
communication. If you were to move to that, the implications in
cost and transportation of anything, whether you have a
reprocessing plant, spent fuel, or doing anything, would become
staggering.
The question of federalization of the forces, that is to
actually have federal people driving those trucks, has
additional cost implications. But I think it is wrong to
believe that there hasn't been work done. I mean, you may have
been talking with people that don't know the historical work
that was done. You may have been talking about people that
don't know what RW was trying to do. Whether it is adequate or
not, in light of this, I don't know, but I know that it has
gone far enough to do studies looking at all of the donor
sites, of which there are--I think there are 106 or 108, not
just the operating reactors. And there are certainly--there is
a stack of documents this thick on security at Yucca Mountain,
including the transportation from the entry to Yucca Mountain
to the location at the Yucca Mountain site. I know this,
because I--the National Academy panel that I am part of was
asked to consider doing a study on research and development and
the security at Yucca Mountain. So we have seen some of those
reports. I don't think--it may not be enough, sir, but there is
a substantial amount of work out there.
Mr. Matheson. Thank you, Madame Chair.
Chairwoman Biggert. Thank you.
Do you have any more questions, Mr. Honda?
Mr. Honda. Just a quick question, and this is probably
reflective of my ignorance. But what I have heard is that, and
I think it was Mr. Johnson that indicated that the reprocessing
of uranium is, what, 96 percent or 94 percent of its total
weight in volume, I guess. And encapsulating that for storage,
that is one step, but aren't there other byproducts of
reprocessing or of creating the waste that other materials have
to be encapsulated, also, so that in practice it appears that
there will be more volume than just the waste itself. There are
other wastes that are created so that the volume is really
more. If that is the case, then how does that really solve our
storage and our nuclear waste problem?
Mr. Johnson. Yes. What I was referring to was that, by
mass, uranium constitutes 96 percent of the mass of spent
nuclear fuel, and that uranium is primarily uranium--the
isotope uranium-238. The fissile content of the uranium-235 in
spent nuclear fuel is slightly above that of natural uranium.
It is roughly--it is a little less than 1 percent, on average.
You are correct in that the separations technologies that we
are currently investigating within our--the Department's
programs, is looking at partitioning spent fuel into
different--into its different constituents, separating out the
uranium. That does provide significant volume reduction, but as
I mentioned earlier, the primary concern in repository
performance is the heat generation. And that heat generation is
driven both in a short-term and a long-term component. By
separating the spent fuel into these different elemental
constituents, yes, you have not really reduced the amount of
material, it--the amount of material that has to be stored, but
it is the recognition that all of that material doesn't then
have to go into a geologic repository. For example, the uranium
can be extracted at such purity that it could possibly be
stored as a low-level class C waste. It would meet that type of
requirement that would therefore not need to go into a
repository--into a geologic repository. The other constituents
could be stored for future destruction or transmutation in
future fast reactor systems that would minimize the volume of
the highly radioactive materials that would have to go into a
repository.
Mr. Bunn. I think that--I agree with Dr. Finck that what we
need is an end-to-end systems analysis on this kind of thing,
because when you look at reprocessing, you have got, depending
on which technologies you are using, a variety of different
streams of high-level waste or species you are going to send
for transmutation, but you also then have to look at
intermediate-level waste, low-level waste. You have to look at,
when you are done with the reprocessing plant, when it has
outlived its lifetime, the decommissioning waste, the same for
the transmutation facilities and so on. And then you have to
compare the costs of managing those various different waste
streams and the hazards of managing those various waste streams
and hazards with other options. So I think that is the kind of
examination that needs to be done. The cost--the volumes of,
for example, decommissioning waste projected from the
reprocessing plants in France are quite large.
Dr. Finck. If I may, volume in Yucca Mountain is not the
issue, as the gentleman is saying. The issue is heat load
generation, and most of the heat load comes from a few percent
of the waste. That is what we have to deal with. Essentially,
we have to get rid of that heat to increase the capacity of
Yucca Mountain. No, I fully agree. We have to look at an
integrated cycle to see where the benefits and costs are and to
gain where we can.
Mr. Honda. So the other wastes that are created that have
to be contained, you are saying that those are safe and all we
have to do is find a storage place for them?
Dr. Finck. No, the ones that are toxic. What we want to do
is transmute them. Basically take them, let us say, americium-
241, and fission it into elements or isotopes that are much
less toxic. And you do this by running it through a--in a
reactor.
Mr. Honda. And is this what is happening in France and in
Japan and in the UK where they are completely being able to
deal with their waste or----
Dr. Finck. No.
Mr. Honda.--do they have waste issues, also?
Mr. Bunn. Go ahead.
Dr. Finck. They take the first step there. They take care
of one of the elements, one of the isotopes. They take care of
plutonium-239 by burning it partially, but they plan, in the
future, to do exactly what we described earlier, take care of
the other elements, which we usually call minor actinides. And
their plans for the years to come, roughly when we plan to do
it, is also to find ways to destroy these minor actinides. But
right now, they only burn plutonium-239 partially, and they
store the resulting fuels and the resulting minor actinides are
stored for future use.
Mr. Bunn. But the way that they are implementing
reprocessing today, with, as Dr. Finck said, one round of
recycling of the plutonium as in plutonium mixed-oxide, or MOX,
fuel, in their existing light water reactors, has essentially
no noticeable waste management benefits. As Dr. Finck and Mr.
Johnson have both said, the volume and cost of a repository is
determined by the heat output, while if you go to a system with
one round of reprocessing and MOX and then disposal, you
actually have more heat rather than less for--compared to a
direct disposal per unit--you know, per number of kilowatt
hours generated. And you don't have any significant reduction
in the radiological toxicity, the doses from the repository,
because the only thing you are separating is the uranium and
the plutonium, and those, basically, don't contribute
significantly to the doses--from geologic repositories. So you
really have to go to the kinds of transmutation technologies
that Dr. Finck is developing in order to get the kinds of
benefits that----
Dr. Finck. If I may complement. We actually get a very
small benefit from MOX. It is like 10 percent, not really big.
Mr. Bunn. The studies I have seen go the other direction,
but we can talk about that.
Dr. Finck. Well, I like to do my own studies.
Mr. Honda. Well, through the Chair and--I just want to
thank you for your testimony, but my sense is that it is much
more complicated of an issue that requires a systems approach
to look at the entire problem and look in that--some matrix
that would address the issues of proliferation and the dangers
intermittently----
Mr. Bunn. And for that reason----
Mr. Honda.--combined together rather than just talking
about storage and transferring to other countries for
processing and coming back. It is much more complicated than
that, and I appreciate the--your input in providing this
insight for me.
Chairwoman Biggert. Thank you.
I am glad that Mr. Honda brought this back to the systems
analysis, because I think that is where we needed to go back. I
would like to go one step further back, and I think in my
opening statement I talked about the log and how we take three
percent off one side and three percent on the other end and
throw the rest into the fire to burn and then we take it out
and put it in a mountain, or we are going to try.
When I was--in the 1960s and I first went to France, and I
can remember going to these hotels. We used to go in Europe on
$5 a day. That doesn't happen anymore, but it was--we would go
to these hotels, and you would walk into the hotel, and you
would come in at night, and to turn on the lights to go up the
stairs, you would push a little button and the lights would go
on, and then you would get--try and make it to the top of that
staircase to push the next button, because the next staircase
the lights were going to--and having been to France since then,
you know, things have changed. They--the electricity that is
there, you don't drive with your--just the car headlights
anymore, the buildings are lit up like it was never before. And
80 percent of France's electricity is nuclear. Ours is 20
percent. Now I live in a state that is over 50 percent
electric, because we have had a lot of nuclear facilities
there. My point is that, you know, here we have a clean,
environmentally-friendly energy source, and we keep saying,
``Well, we should wait. We should wait and, you know, just use
that small amount of the energy, the fuel, and let the--just
burn up the rest or--and then put it away.'' And that concerns
me that in--you know, for future generations, we have got to
find means of energy that is going to be--to have that rather
than being oil now--oil dependent. Now we don't need
electricity, but we need natural gas. We need different fuels
that are not going to be around, fossil fuels. And I think that
this is imperative that we start to work on it, because the
time it is going to take to create the fast reactor where we
are going to have the closed fuel cycle and be able to do all
of this in one place and really, you know, time after time use
this fuel until it is gone and then have this small amount to
put into Yucca Mountain. And it always seems to come down to
the issue of non-proliferation. That is the first--everything
everybody says, and I know that this has been worked on for
years and years. France is using something that is really
outdated, compared to what we can do now, and just for one
thing that Mr. Bunn said that--you know, you had said that
there are 240 tons of separated--where--weapons-usable
plutonium already exists throughout the world. So you know, I
know we have to be concerned about terrorists, but--seeking
nuclear material, but if there is plutonium that is being used
and produced by UREX+ and even if it isn't lethal, wouldn't
somebody--you know, somebody go after the pure plutonium that
they can find rather than something that has, you know, been
reprocessed like that?
Mr. Bunn. Well, I, for one, agree that there are a huge
number of places in the world that, today at least, are
sufficiently vulnerable that have either highly-enriched
uranium or plutonium that they would be the places of choice
for terrorists to get that kind of material. And one of the
points I made in my testimony is that we, as a Nation, have to
be working as fast as we can to lock down all of those
stockpiles.
I don't think that proliferation is the only issue here. I
agree with you that nuclear energy is something that I would
like to see grow as one of the potential answers to climate
change----
Chairwoman Biggert. And don't you think that----
Mr. Bunn.--but I don't think we need reprocessing as part
of that. In fact, I think a near-term decision to reprocess
would be more likely to undermine than to promote the future of
nuclear energy.
Chairwoman Biggert. But don't you think that we really need
to take in the cost consideration of the global climate?
Mr. Bunn. Absolutely. And because we need to take into the
cost consideration, that is one of the reasons why I think we
shouldn't reprocess. The cost of climate change is an issue of
nuclear energy----
Chairwoman Biggert. But what we will be spending for other
types of--like the carbon that is--you know, that is creating
the problems, and if we have the nuclear, then that is going to
change the costs that we are going to have to spend on the
environment.
Mr. Bunn. But what I am saying is you can have nuclear
energy without reprocessing. In fact, I believe you are more
likely to have growth in nuclear energy if we don't pursue
reprocessing with the technologies that are available now or in
the near-term.
Chairwoman Biggert. But having been over in France and
having seen those pools and the way that the storage is, I
mean, they are getting to--you know, like the big rooms, like
the football field with the cask, and then you have got the
water pool in the other room. And that is--you know, they are
doing well, but when we can reduce, you know, the amount of
radioactivity and the heat to where--to--down to, let us say,
300 years versus 10,000 years, that is a big difference in a
cost to us as far as, you know, having the ability to put that
some place.
Dr. Hagengruber. If I could just make a comment.
I think it is really important in the systems analysis to
also look at the history of how the government participated in
the industry, not only in this country, but in France, and how
they participate today, just like Airbus and Boeing, are
interesting issues.
I think the other thing is that from a systems point of
view, this is the only energy source that we are going to look
at, that attractive energy source, where the government will
bear an enormous burden. It is worse than ethanol or solar
energy or geothermal in terms of the subsidy, because you will
not be able to create an industry that would freely build this
reprocessing plant, would freely move and recycle the material,
would freely build the generations of reactors in which it
would most efficiently be done if the entire--almost the entire
research and development burden for this, not just the
reprocessing facility, the Generation IV reactors, everything,
will be borne by the government, and that is quite unlike any
other energy source. If you put that into the context, then, of
how much we spend dealing with the threat of nuclear weapons or
the threat of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, it
means that--I mean, I actually believe, from a physicist's
point of view, recycling makes sense for the very reasons that
you say. On the other hand, proliferation has been a persistent
problem. It is an emotional problem. It is one that gets into
the deepest sense of fear that people have. And it affects the
political environment, the cycles of support and non-support
for nuclear energy. We have seen those cycles now since the
Manhattan Project, and we will see them again. It seems to me
that it behooves us then to make a decision that is most robust
that draws the most constituency across the political spectrum.
And I think that decision should include the closed cycle. But
I think the time--the timing of the closed cycle is something
where there should be an exquisite attention paid not to how
efficiently we could get the Department of Energy to do the
research, but how much the Congress, committees like this,
could demand that the standards of proliferation be reasonably
answered when they see the alternative technologies, because in
the end, Madame Chairman, you and your colleagues will bear
almost the entire cost of the development of this part of the
cycle.
Chairwoman Biggert. Well, I know that, you know, the
Administration has come out and said we need to move forward
with the advanced fuel. And there has been some discussion
that, you know, the cost of doing the first fast reactor or
doing the first--the whole process is going to be huge. But
once that is built, then it will reduce the costs that the
utilities will be able to come in and do that, is that
something that you think is possible?
Dr. Hagengruber. We have--we built a fast reactor in
Tennessee, essentially completed. And it did not run. We built
the West Valley field facility for recycling, and it ran for a
few years and was shut down.
Chairwoman Biggert. But we actually had one in Illinois,
too, that was built but never opened.
Dr. Hagengruber. Right. And it seems to me that it goes
back to the----
Chairwoman Biggert. But that was political.
Dr. Hagengruber. But it is just, in a way--well, but that
is my point is it is not physics. And it is--and we are not the
threat of proliferation. Our material is very unlikely to be
truly the threat to terrorists, even in this country, because
we do provide a high level of security. It certainly is true in
France. The security is exquisite. In the end, the question is
whether or not the international regime we launch now, as we
did in the 1950s, launched the nuclear regime that is around
the world, whether or not that regime will be one we want to
live with, you know, in the--for the next 20 years.
Chairwoman Biggert. Well, we launched that, but I would say
in the 1970s, you know, we said shut down all of the
reprocessing. The United States did. Nobody else did, and they
haven't followed our lead on that. Do you think we are still a
leader in this industry at the moment?
Dr. Hagengruber. I think that the--I believe that the
international community still looks to the United States in
terms of, like, the permanent geologic repository, I know from
my discussions with the RW people, that people in France and
everywhere look to the United States asking, ``What are you
going to do?'' They look at Yucca Mountain to see. I think in
the question of reprocessing and what will happen to an
economy, a plutonium economy in the world, the question about
Generation IV reactors, the investments that our government
makes will be the ones that set the standards. So even though
there have been countries that are successfully reprocessing,
et cetera, is that the reactors the French are trying to sell
to China are the reactors that were developed in the technology
here in the United States. It is changed somewhat, but they are
not an original design. And so, you know, in the end, we will
have a major influence. The decisions made, you know, in these
next few years will have a major influence on what the world
decides. And even though we should have lost our leadership, I
mean, we have been sitting still for 25 years, we have not. I
mean, there is still--they will look to us to see how much of
an investment we make. Generation IV, the advanced fuel cycle,
these decisions are ones in which the U.S. leadership will have
a profound effect on the world's decisions.
Chairwoman Biggert. Dr. Finck.
Dr. Finck. Yeah, if I may, two comments.
I would like the United States to regain leadership in the
nuclear business. I wouldn't be as optimistic as Dr.
Hagengruber that we have kept everything. For example, in the
repository, sure they look at our solution, but as Matt Bunn
was saying, we are the only one to have put it in a mountain
with limited walls. They are looking at very different
solutions. Maybe, possibly, they are learning from our
mistakes. I don't know.
But you know, one more thing I would comment on, we need to
stop thinking the same way we were thinking 30 years ago. The
world has really changed. Global warming is, today, a
recognized issue, at least by many scientists, and it is going
to affect the future, maybe not mine, but certainly my children
and grandchildren. It will affect more than any other program
we had in our civilization before. We--oil, the price of oil
has gone up, and I believe, unlike in the past where we have
oil crisis due to a supply of political issue on the supply
side, this time it has to deal with a major increase in demand,
mostly in China and India. And I believe, I might be wrong, and
hopefully I am wrong, the price of oil will be up for a very,
very long time, maybe forever because these countries are
consuming more. So the world has really changed, and the way we
look at nuclear must address these changes, too. We need to
increase nuclear to have a cleaner environment, to have more
secure energy, and if we do not deal with the waste problem,
that will prevent nuclear from moving forward. We need to deal
with it.
Chairwoman Biggert. Thank you very much.
Mr. Bunn.
Mr. Bunn. I believe that we do have some leadership and
some influence on other countries, and that is part of the
reason that I am concerned that President Bush's approach,
where he has made stopping the spread of reprocessing to
additional countries a key element of his nonproliferation
policy, will be more difficult to carry out if we, ourselves,
are moving forward with large-scale commercial reprocessing in
our country. If we are doing it, it will be more difficult to
convince others not to. Countries like South Korea and Taiwan
have both expressed interest in reprocessing. They have been
not pursuing it, because of U.S. pressure, and they both had
secret nuclear weapons programs based on reprocessing in the
past that were stopped under U.S. pressure. We just read in the
newspaper this morning about additional secret reprocessing
work in Iran that the IAEA has reported. So I think a
nontrivial part of the consideration is what influence will
this have on our ability to convince other countries to follow
what is a significant part of President Bush's
nonproliferation----
Chairwoman Biggert. So I guess what you are saying is that
we shouldn't move forward in our research and development if
another country might do it, too?
Mr. Bunn. That is not correct. I have strongly supported
continued research and development in my testimony. What I am
saying is we should allow time for the technology to develop.
We have available today commercially safe, cheap, reliable ways
to manage our nuclear fuel for decades to come. We should allow
the time for a responsible decision with more development of
the technology.
Chairwoman Biggert. Mr. Johnson, do you have anything to
add?
Mr. Johnson. No, ma'am.
Chairwoman Biggert. No? Okay. Thank you, all. Thank you,
all of the panelists today, for testifying before this
subcommittee, and I really appreciate all that you have--the
expertise that you have brought to this Committee. And
obviously, this is a very complex issue, and we will be holding
further hearings, and I know that it is--I think we do have a
responsibility to know all of the facts and make decisions
based on that, and I appreciate all that you have contributed
to that.
So if there is no objection, the record will remain open
for additional statements from the members and for answers to
any follow-up questions the Subcommittee may ask the panelists.
Without objection, so ordered.
The hearing is now adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:34 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
Appendix:
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Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Responses by Robert Shane Johnson, Acting Director, Office of Nuclear
Energy, Science, and Technology; Deputy Director for
Technology, U.S. Department of Energy
Questions submitted by Chairman Judy Biggert
Q1. There was some discussion during the hearing about the economics
of reprocessing, once it becomes commercial scale. What are the major
steps necessary before the technology is mature enough for commercial
deployment? For each of those steps, do we have enough information to
estimate the associated costs? If so, what are the costs?
A1. Assuming that any near-term (e.g., within twenty years) commercial
deployment in the United States would involve one of the UREX+ flow
sheet variations, the major steps remaining are (1) completion of both
laboratory-scale experiments and modeling efforts to characterize the
selected flow sheet and its associated control/accountability system,
and (2) successful testing at an engineering scale of the integrated
flow sheet and controls. Some preliminary cost estimates have been made
based on laboratory experience to date plus related data from
commercial scale separations operations in foreign countries.
Additional research and development is needed to identify the losses
between process steps and the scalability of the technology.
Questions submitted by Representative Dave G. Reichert
Q1. I understand that there is likely to be a shortfall of trained
professional nuclear engineers, nuclear scientists, health physicists,
radiochemists and actinide specialists brought on in part by the
impending retirement of a substantial portion of the national lab staff
with experience in these fields. I am further advised that Universities
in my state with leading radiochemistry programs are hindered in
attracting nuclear science and engineering students.
How will a renewed development of the nuclear fuel
cycle, including nuclear reprocessing, in the U.S. be staffed
with competent scientists and engineers?
A1. The Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy, Science
and Technology's (NE) supports nuclear science, radiochemistry, health
physics, and engineering programs at U.S. colleges and universities
through the University reactor Infrastructure and Education Assistance
program (University Programs). This program has been in place for over
a decade and it along with the efforts of universities and industry has
led to a significant increase in enrollments in these programs. For
example, nuclear engineering programs in the U.S. increased from 490
students in 1998 to more than 1,500 today. Additionally, the Department
provides targeted opportunities to outstanding students interested in
disciplines related to nuclear fuel cycles, through fellowships awarded
through the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative.
Q2. Numerous National Academy studies have emphasized the need for
international cooperation and collaboration in the development of
future nuclear fuel cycles.
What role might international agreements play in the
growth of our involvement in closing the loop on the nuclear
fuel cycle? In other words, how might we achieve a mutual
benefit through cooperation with the French, the Japanese or
the Russians who are all involved in advanced fuel cycle work?
A2. The Department is actively engaged with several other countries in
developing next-generation nuclear energy systems including advanced,
proliferation-resistant fuels and fuel cycles. Through the Generation
IV Nuclear Energy Systems Initiative, the Advanced Fuel Cycle
Initiative (AFCI) and the International Nuclear Energy Research
Initiative (INERI), collaborative research and development (R&D) into
advanced fuel cycles, including treatment and recycling of spent
nuclear fuel, has been underway for over four years. The United States
is currently collaborating with France, Japan, and the European Union.
The United States is gaining insight into other countries' recent
operational experience and sharing in their expertise as new, improved,
proliferation-resistant advanced fuel cycle technologies are jointly
developed. These cooperative activities involving spent fuel
reprocessing and advanced plutonium-bearing fuel fabrication
technologies are sensitive and subject to technology transfer export
controls.
Questions submitted by Representative Michael M. Honda
Q1. The House report language mentions the West Valley reprocessing
plant. How much has it cost to clean up the reprocessing waste left
over from operation of West Valley from 1966-1972? How much is it
expected to cost? How long will the clean-up take?
A1. The Department's cost from the 1980 inception of the West Valley
Demonstration Project (WVDP) through 1996 was $1.1 billion and included
design, construction and initiation of hot operation of the high-level
waste vitrification facility. Since 1997 (when the Office of
Environmental Management began formally collecting cost information)
through Fiscal Year 2004, the Department spent an additional $832
million (current year dollars). Per the WVDP Act (P.L. 96-368, 1980),
this represents the Federal Government's contribution of 90 percent;
the State of New York contributes 10 percent.
The Department plans to address its responsibilities under the WVDP
Act in two phases. The preliminary estimated cost to complete the first
step (associated with interim end state completion on or before 2010)
is an additional $443 million for a total of $1.275 billion since 1997.
The scope associated with this phase of the work includes completion of
off-site low-level and transuranic waste disposition, and
decontamination and demolition of facilities previously utilized to
support tank waste solidification. The preliminary cost estimate
associated with storage, surveillance, and monitoring of the vitrified
waste canisters through 2035 (when off-site disposition is planned for
completion) is $390 million.
The second step includes tank decommissioning. DOE and the State of
New York are jointly developing an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS)
for Decommissioning and/or Long-term Management of the West Valley
Demonstration Project to evaluate various options for the site,
including the technical, cost, and schedule considerations. The cost
estimate and schedule associated with this final phase of the WVDP will
be developed based on the outcome of the EIS, to be published in 2008.
Q2. Do you have an estimate of what it would cost to implement the
plan proposed by Chairman Hobson to reprocess 50,000 metric tons of
commercial nuclear waste at one or more Department of Energy (DOE)
sites?
A2. No, the Department does not have an estimate for these costs. This
is a very large undertaking and the Department is pursuing order of
magnitude estimates during FY 2006.
Q3. Is the estimate for reprocessing of $280 billion from DOE's
roadmap over 117 years still current? What fraction of this cost
estimate was from reprocessing? Does this include cost for physical
protection and safeguards of plutonium created? What design basis
threat is assumed? Are you assuming a 9/11 magnitude threat in these
estimates?
A3. These cost estimates are out of date. New technologies are under
development that would represent a fraction of the costs that were
estimated in 1999 with different technologies.
Q4. What are the principal technological uncertainties related to the
development of the UREX+ process?
A4. While there are five technology variations under the UREX+
technology, the Department believes that one of these variations is
most advantageous from a proliferation resistance perspective (in that
it does not separate pure plutonium or separate pure plutonium plus
neptunium). For that reason, most of the research and development is
expected to be focused on that variation.
Q5. On page 4 of your testimony you state that commercial scale-up of
spent fuel technologies could be accomplished relatively rapidly if
existing domestic facilities could be modified and used. Where are
these facilities and who owns them?
A5. There are four such facilities that could possibly be used in
demonstrating the technologies. Two are private facilities built in the
1970s but never completed or operated with spent fuel. One is the
Barnwell plant on the edge of the DOE Savannah River Site in South
Carolina, designed and built by the Allied Chemical Company. The second
is the General Electric Company's Morris Plant, at the edge of the
Dresden Power Reactor south of Chicago, which is an active fuel storage
facility containing about 800 tons of spent fuel originally slated for
processing in the plant.
The other two facilities are at DOE sites: Savannah River Site and
the Idaho National Laboratory (INL). The Savannah River facility is
known as the H Canyon, previously used for processing spent reactor
fuel for weapons purposes and now used as part of the site cleanup. The
INL facilities are at the Idaho Nuclear Technology and Engineering
Center (INTEC), consisting of several buildings previously used or
intended to be used to process spent naval nuclear reactor fuel.
Q6. How will DOE select a reprocessing technology for the future? What
factors will be taken into account?
A6. The selection of a reprocessing technology is dependent on
economics, reliability, ease of scale-up and considerations related to
safety and proliferation resistance. Advanced aqueous processing are
best suited to treat spent nuclear fuel being stored and generated
today and therefore are the technologies likely to be selected for
reprocessing of those fuels. Pyrochemical processes may be better
suited for spent fuel from advanced fast reactors.
Q7. Does the use of MOX fuel in light water reactors in conjunction
with reprocessing actually reduce the amount of waste that will
ultimately need to go into Yucca Mountain from the existing fleet of
reactors in the U.S.? Please provide some specific numbers to
illustrate your answer.
A7. The present technical capacity of Yucca Mountain is limited not as
much by the amount of waste, but rather by the long-term heat produced
by the waste and certain repository design restrictions. The principal
sources of long-term heat are the transuranic elements in the waste.
The most important of these are plutonium-241, americium-241 and
neptunium-237. Aqueous reprocessing and the recycle of plutonium/
neptunium into a modified form of MOX fuel to light water reactors can
be used to transmute the critical transuranic isotopes and eliminate
uranium (95 percent of the spent fuel by weight) from the final waste
going to the repository. Therefore, by using these two processes
together, it is possible both to decrease the amount of waste and to
increase the technical capacity of the repository by a factor of about
two.
Q8. Is MOX a U.S. technology? If MOX is used, will the U.S. have to
pay royalties to the owners of the technology?
A8. The MOX technology was originally developed in the United States
and therefore the U.S. would not need to pay royalties if MOX
technology is used.
Q9. Does reprocessing itself create additional waste? If so, what is
it?
A9. Reprocessing using a technology such as UREX+ would not create
additional liquid high level waste as is associated with current
generation PURER technology. The purpose of reprocessing is to reduce
the total quantity of high level waste requiring repository disposal as
compared with direct disposal of the same fuel. The French reprocessing
experience with the PURER process has demonstrated a factor of four
reduction in waste volume. Advanced aqueous recycling processes under
development in the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative (AFCI) program have
the potential for further volume reductions. This is because the high
level waste would not have short or long term heat producing isotopes
and therefore, would be superior to the PURER technology.
Q10. Are there other ways to burn nuclear waste in a reactor than MOX?
What are they?
A10. MOX is the only fuel technology that has been commercially
deployed for light water reactors. Research has been ongoing for
several advanced technologies:
-- Multi-recycle schemes based on MOX fuels have been
investigated that provide greater benefits than the standard
MOX approach, but come at a cost of significant difficulties in
designing and operating fuel cycle plants.
-- Advanced fuels, called Inert Matrix Fuels, that contain no
uranium are being investigated and could provide additional
benefits beyond MOX fuel. However, the development of Inert
Matrix Fuels is not sufficiently advanced for
commercialization.
Q11. Can high temperature gas cooled reactors burn nuclear waste after
it has been reprocessed? If a gas cooled reactor is built at the Idaho
National Lab, could it be used to demonstrate another means of getting
rid of nuclear waste?
A11. Spent fuel from existing light water reactors contains plutonium
and other transuranic elements (higher actinides) which are the most
important contributors to the long-term radiological hazards and
performance uncertainties for a geologic repository. Reprocessing can
be used to separate these isotopes, which can then be fabricated into
fuel for light water reactors or gas cooled reactors. By burning this
fuel, thermal reactors (light water and gas cooled reactors) could
destroy higher actinides, the plutonium.
Q12. DOE has many nuclear related issues that must be addressed
including nuclear waste, non-proliferation, building new reactors in
the near term, Gen IV reactors, rebuilding nuclear capability and
industry in the U.S., nuclear hydrogen production and so on. I have the
sense that many of these issues have been treated as unrelated and that
there has not been an effort to take a systems view at DOE of these
opportunities and issues. Is this the case? Would there be benefits
from trying to see whether certain technologies or strategies would
address two or more of these issues?
A12. The Department agrees that an integrated approach is needed to
address the front and back end of the nuclear fuel cycle as well as
reactor technologies. To that end, the Department has employed a
systems approach to its research, specifically treating the issues such
as waste minimization, energy optimization, proliferation resistance,
economics and safety in an integrated fashion. The performance criteria
associated with Generation IV reactors are closely coordinated with the
advanced fuel cycle research and development. For example, as part of
the fuels development effort, the Department is pursuing fuels that are
proliferation resistant and recyclable, and are integrating the
research and development on the fuels to meet both fuel cycle and
reactor performance requirements.
In addition, in FY 2006, the Administration is proposing to
commission a comprehensive review of NE program goals and plans by the
National Academy of Sciences. The evaluation will validate the process
of establishing program priorities and will result in a comprehensive
and detailed set of policy and research recommendations, including
performance targets and metrics for an integrated agenda of research
activities.
Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Responses by Matthew Bunn, Senior Research Associate, Project on
Managing the Atom, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School
of Government
Questions submitted by Representative Michael M. Honda
Q1. If the United States made a decision to proceed with reprocessing
its commercial spent nuclear fuel what impact would that have on our
efforts to limit the spread of reprocessing and enrichment technologies
around the world, and convince other countries not to pursue this
technology themselves?
A1. If the United States undertakes large-scale reprocessing of its own
commercial spent nuclear fuel, it will become significantly more
difficult to convince other states that it is not in their national
interest to pursue similar technology. The United States will have
little ability to ensure that other states adopt proliferation-
resistant approaches to reprocessing. Thus, the effort to stem the
spread of reprocessing technology, a key element of President Bush's
nonproliferation strategy, could be significantly undermined. At the
same time, the magnitude of this effect should not be overstated; there
are only a limited number of countries that do not already have
operating reprocessing capabilities but are interested in establishing
such capabilities (or might plausibly become interested in the next
decade). Over the longer-term, the effect might be more significant.
Q2. It is vital to ensure that plutonium already separated by
reprocessing is adequately secured against terrorist theft. What more
should the U.S. Government be doing to ensure that nuclear stockpiles
around the world are secure and accounted for and cannot fall into
terrorist hands?
A2. A sea-change in the level of sustained White House engagement
focused on sweeping aside the bureaucratic and political obstacles to
rapid progress in locking down the world's nuclear stockpiles is
urgently needed. An accelerated and strengthened effort would have many
ingredients, but three are essential:
accelerating and strengthening the effort in Russia,
where the largest stockpiles of potentially vulnerable nuclear
materials still exist, with the goal of ensuring that all
nuclear weapons and weapons-usable materials there are secure
enough to defeat demonstrated insider and outsider threats in
Russia by the end of 2008, in a way that will last after U.S.
assistance phases out;
removing the potential bomb material entirely from
the world's most vulnerable sites (particularly research
reactors fueled with highly enriched uranium), with the goal of
removing nuclear material or providing highly effective
security for all of the most vulnerable sites within four
years, and eliminating the civilian use of highly enriched
uranium worldwide within roughly a decade; and
building a fast-paced global coalition to improve
security for nuclear weapons and weapons-usable nuclear
materials around the world, with the goal of ensuring that
every nuclear weapon and every kilogram of weapons-usable
nuclear material, wherever it may be in the world, is secure
and accounted for.
In addition to securing nuclear material at its sources--the
critical first line of defense--strengthened efforts are also needed to
beef up the inevitably weaker lines of defense that come into play
after a nuclear weapon or nuclear material has already been stolen,
including particularly strengthened police and intelligence operations
(including sting operations and the like) focused on preventing nuclear
smuggling and identifying potential nuclear terrorist cells.
The effort to lock down nuclear stockpiles around the world should
be considered a central part of the war on terrorism. Homeland security
begins abroad; wherever there is an insecure cache of potential nuclear
bomb material, there is a potentially deadly threat to the United
States. As Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) has argued, the war on
terrorism cannot be considered won until all nuclear weapons and
weapons-usable nuclear materials worldwide are demonstrably secured and
accounted for, to standards sufficient to prevent terrorists and
criminals from gaining access to them.
President Bush should issue a directive identifying prevention of
nuclear terrorism as a top national security priority, and appoint a
senior official, with the access needed to get a presidential decision
whenever necessary, to lead the many disparate efforts now underway to
keep nuclear capabilities out of terrorist hands. A detailed set of
recommendations is available in Securing the Bomb 2005: The New Global
Imperatives, available on-line at http://www.nti.org/cnwm.
Q3. You state in your testimony (p. 8) that if the government is
fulfilling its obligation to take title to spent fuel and clear
progress is being made on the waste repository then potential investors
in nuclear plants will have sufficient confidence to make a commitment.
Given that the repository is about 10 years late in opening the
government has yet to take possession of significant volumes of fuel,
how much longer do you believe investors will give the benefit of the
doubt to the government that it will ultimately fulfill its contractual
obligations to take possession of existing spent fuel and open a
permanent repository?
A3. From the perspective of a potential investor in a new nuclear
plant--or the owner of an existing one--the most important thing is
that the spent fuel must not become an indefinite political and
economic liability hanging around the neck of the privately owned
plant. If it was clear that the government was going to pay all the
costs of the fuel's storage, or better yet, take it to an off-site
location (for example, an interim storage facility), that would address
the most important investor concerns; what happens to it after that,
whether reprocessing or storage followed by direct disposal, is less
critical from the investor's point of view.
Indeed, a decision to reprocess U.S. spent nuclear fuel would be
more likely to undermine than to strengthen investor interest in new
nuclear power plants. Reprocessing would be significantly more costly
than direct disposal, meaning that either (a) the nuclear waste fee
would and would have to be substantially increased; (b) the government
would have to pass onerous regulations forcing industry to build and
operate facilities that would not be economic in themselves; or (c) the
government would have to provide many billions of dollars in subsidies
for this approach to spent fuel management. From the point of view of a
potential investor in nuclear power, options (a) and (b) are quite
unattractive, and whether the government would actually fulfill its
obligations in option (c) is, if anything, more uncertain than Yucca
Mountain (and a permanent repository would still be needed in any
case). Moreover, it is clear that reprocessing would provoke
substantial political controversy in the United States, which would
also be a negative from an investor's perspective. If we want nuclear
energy to have a bright future, we need to make it as cheap, as simple,
as safe, as proliferation-resistant, and as non-controversial as
possible, and near-term reprocessing points in the wrong direction on
every count.
In short, the government must meet its contractual obligations, but
that does not help make the case for reprocessing of the fuel. The
actual cost of storage of U.S. spent fuel for another decade--to the
utilities, or to the government--is actually quite modest; estimates
that storage will cost the government $1 billion per year are vastly
overstated. That being said, it is important, regardless of what
decisions are made about reprocessing, to move forward in a timely way
with licensing and opening a permanent repository.
Q4. You note that the Department of Energy (DOE) has not performed a
credible life cycle cost analysis of the cost of a reprocessing and
transmutation system compared to that of direct disposal. Do you
recommend that the Committee direct DOE to conduct such an analysis? Is
that a necessary first step, in your opinion?
A4. Such an analysis is certainly needed, but it should be only one
part of a broader assessment of the costs and benefits of near-term
reprocessing, compared to interim storage followed by direct disposal.
If advocates argue that separations and transmutation are needed to
make more repository space available, then a credible study is needed--
which does not yet exist--of all the available options for achieving
that goal, with their costs, risks, and benefits, not just of
reprocessing. If advocates argue that separations and transmutation
will reduce the toxicity and lifetime of the waste to be disposed, then
a credible study is needed--which does not yet exist--of the total
life-cycle environmental hazards posed by direct disposal compared to
those of separations and transmutation (including near-term doses from
operations of the relevant facilities, not just long-term doses from a
permanent repository, and including not only doses from normal
operations but from plausible accidents as well). In the post-9/11 era,
detailed analyses of the terrorist risks of both approaches are needed,
and these, too, have not yet been done. No realistic evaluation of the
impact of a reprocessing and transmutation on the existing nuclear fuel
industry has yet been done. No serious evaluation of the licensing and
public acceptance issues facing development and deployment of a
separations and transmutation system has yet been done. No serious
assessment of the safety and terrorism risks of a reprocessing and
transmutation system, compared to those of direct disposal has yet been
done. Assessments of the proliferation implications of the proposed
systems that are detailed enough to support responsible decision-making
have not yet been done. In short, virtually none of the most important
information on which to base a responsible decision to carry out
reprocessing of U.S. nuclear fuel is yet available. The Committee
should consider directing DOE to carry out studies of all these
matters, or assigning such studies to the National Academy of Sciences.
In either case, the Committee should allow enough time for careful
consideration of the relevant issues.
Q5. You recommend the establishment of expanded interim storage
facilities ``as a complement and interim backup'' to the Yucca Mountain
repository. Is there any reason why that interim facility shouldn't
also be located at Yucca Mountain?
A5. The area around Yucca Mountain is one plausible location for such
an interim facility, but there are others, and the different possible
locations have both advantages and disadvantages. Obviously, there are
advantages to shipping the fuel to a site close to where it will
ultimately be disposed of. There are also disadvantages, however.
Technically, the area around Yucca Mountain has a high level of seismic
activity, which is more of a problem for an above-ground interim
storage facility than a below-ground repository (just as a storm at sea
is more of a problem for surface ships than for submarines).
Politically, Congress has in the past judged that it would not be fair
to burden Nevada with both the permanent repository and an interim
storage facility. For any interim site, detailed analysis of the best
approaches to providing safe and secure transportation of spent fuel to
the site is needed, and such analyses may reveal that some sites have
significant safety or security advantages over others.
Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Responses by Phillip J. Finck, Deputy Associate Laboratory Director,
Applied Science and Technology and National Security, Argonne
National Laboratory
Questions submitted by Chairman Judy Biggert
Q1. There was some discussion during the hearing about the economics
of reprocessing, once it becomes commercial scale. What are the major
steps necessary before the technology is mature enough for commercial
deployment? For each of those steps, do we have enough information to
estimate the associated costs? If so, what are the costs?
A1. The UREX+ aqueous reprocessing technologies have already been
demonstrated at the laboratory scale with spent nuclear fuel. As these
processing technologies are similar to the mature PUREX process
currently being used in France and the United Kingdom (U.K.) at an
industrial scale, it is likely that scale-up to industrial size will be
successful and relatively straightforward if similar equipment is used.
If advanced equipment, reducing size and cost, is desired, then an
intermediate stage of pilot plant demonstration would be prudent, and
represents the only major step in development. The UREX+ technologies
are candidates for processing spent fuel from light water reactors
(LWRs), typical of present-day nuclear power plants.
Less developed technologies, such as pyroprocessing, should be
viewed as being further from commercialization at an industrial scale.
Ongoing research and development of this method in the DOE Advanced
Fuel Cycle Initiative (AFCI) program is aimed at facilitating the
large-scale commercialization of this technology as well. However, at
this time, the likely use for pyroprocessing is to process spent fuel
from fast neutron reactors that are used for actinide transmutation and
uranium resource extension. Since the U.S. currently does not have any
reactors of this type, but would likely implement them in the future as
part of an overall energy strategy, there is sufficient time for this
technology to mature.
The proposed Advanced Fuel Cycle Facility in the AFCI program would
address the need for pilot scale demonstration of both UREX+ and
pyroprocessing. Results from testing in this facility should allow the
competent design of industrial facilities using these technologies.
While cost estimates for such a facility are necessarily highly
uncertain, due to the lack of recent experience in building such a
facility, it is likely that the current cost estimate for this facility
would be in the range of $1B (including not only processing
demonstration but fuel fabrication capabilities as well), with an
estimated annual operating cost to demonstrate these technologies of
$100M/year. Although admittedly large, these costs need to be placed in
the context of the existing nuclear power industry in the United
States, with capital investment of several hundred billion dollars, and
electricity generation of about $50B or more per year. Payments into
the nuclear waste fund also approach $1B per year, with the anticipated
cost of the Yucca Mountain repository in the neighborhood of $50B.
Questions submitted by Representative Michael M. Honda
Q1. The House report says that European countries ``recycle''
(plutonium) as they go, but actually MOX fuel is not made and used
immediately. (Nor is the high-level liquid waste generated from
reprocessing immediately vitrified; rather it is stored in stainless
steel tanks to cool.) More than 200 metric tons of commercial plutonium
worldwide is separated and has not been used as MOX and the surplus is
building up each year. Many reactors need costly modifications to use
MOX and some reactors cannot be modified. There are about 80 metric
tons of surplus plutonium at La Hague in France and similar amounts at
Sellafield in the United Kingdom (U.K.) and more than 30 metric tons in
Chelyabinsk, Russia. The UK has no reactors which can use plutonium
fuel and no operating MOX factory. How can you explain that this is a
recycling program when the UK has amassed about 80 metric tons of civil
weapons-usable plutonium and has no plans to use this material? (For Pu
amounts reported to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)--see
INFCIRC 549, on IAEA web site.)
A1. At this time, there is a mismatch in the ability to process
commercial spent fuel and the ability to re-use the separated materials
in reactors, both in Europe and elsewhere. As a result, substantial
stockpiles of separated materials have been accumulated, although that
was not the original intent. In France and other countries, the spent
fuel processing activity was intended to be part of an integrated
system where the recovered plutonium would be used in thermal and fast
reactors. However, due to shifting program emphasis and priorities, the
construction and operation of the processing plants has proceeded
mostly as planned, while the reactor systems to use the plutonium have
not. A similar situation also exists in the U.K. and in Russia, for
basically the same reason.
One can ask why the current situation has developed, and the answer
is probably found in a combination of factors. First, electricity
demand, and hence reactor construction, did not grow as envisioned, but
stagnated instead, driven mainly by large improvements in efficiency
for a wide variety of electricity-driven products, including
electronics, appliances, etc., and by a drop in heavy industrial use.
Second, opposition to the use of nuclear power increased dramatically
in the wake of the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents. This
opposition exacerbated the situation, leading to the large mismatch in
capabilities that exist today. Other minor reasons can also be cited,
but the point is that when the plans were originally conceived, the
systems were intended to balance, and achieve the ``recycle as they
go'' condition.
That being said, it should be noted that France is engaged in
recycling the plutonium in those reactors capable of using this
material. Newer reactor designs are intended to allow for increased use
of MOX fuel, which should address the stockpile concern as these
reactors are constructed and brought into service to replace reactors
being decommissioned. The situation in the U.K. and Russia is
different, where the future direction of nuclear power has still not
been decided. Until the time that these countries decide to adopt
plutonium recycling as originally planned, or another disposition path
is taken, the accumulated stockpile of separated plutonium will
continue to exist with no specified purpose, and should be considered
as either a resource for the future or as a separate waste stream for
eventual disposal. The Russian position has been made quite clear many
times: they regard separated plutonium as a valuable energy resource
and plan to utilize this material in the fast reactors that are planned
for deployment in the future.
It is correct that many reactors would need costly modifications to
use MOX, and some cannot be modified to use MOX. But it is also correct
to state that many reactors are ready to use MOX with only minor and no
modifications. Furthermore, I believe that the U.S. should move towards
a close fuel cycle, where the MOX approach would be at best of limited
relevance; this approach would involve the transition towards a new
generation of fast reactors, with novel fuel types and separations
techniques, that would eliminate a very high fraction of radiotoxic
elements.
Q2. France uses plutonium fuel (MOX) in 20 out of 58 reactors, but the
stockpile of civil plutonium continues to increase with no end in
sight. How can this growing stockpile be presented as ``recycling''?
MOX fuel produces only about 15 percent of France's nuclear electricity
and imposes about $1 billion per year in added electricity costs,
according to an official French report. Why does Electricite de France,
the state-owned utility forced to use MOX fuel, place a negative value
on plutonium they must take from the state-owned processing company
(Cogema)?
A2. I am, of course, not able to speak for the French utility industry.
As to the question of recycling, the fact is that the recovered
plutonium is being recycled, but that the rate of recycling is lower
than the design rate of production at the processing plant. As more
reactors become available to use the MOX fuel, this mismatch in
production and demand will diminish, and eventually reverse, gradually
consuming the current stockpile of separated plutonium. This would be
consistent with the original intent of the French planning, but it has
not yet been put into place.
The question of the added cost would need to be examined carefully
to determine what is included and what is not included. The negative
value on plutonium compared to standard enriched uranium fuel appears
reasonable, as any fuel made from separated materials is likely to cost
more than enriched uranium fuel as long as uranium ore costs remain
low--it is not at all clear that this situation will remain stable for
the foreseeable future. Basically, enrichment to the required level is
currently cheaper than fuel processing, separation, and MOX
fabrication. However, this probably does not account for the changes
that have been made in the resulting waste stream. In France, and in
other countries, such an accounting may be difficult, as no waste
disposal strategy has been determined. Without a strategy in place, one
cannot place a value on the reduction in waste volume and toxicity
arising from spent fuel processing. Depending on the ultimate cost of
disposal, the cost savings from the reduced amount of waste may be
sufficient to offset or even exceed the additional costs of processing,
or they may not. It is important to realize, though, that these costs
still only represent a minute fraction of the cost of generating
nuclear electricity, and when one examines the value of pursuing a
given strategy, such as plutonium recycling, the entire system must be
considered, from mining to geologic disposal.
Q3. Japan is in the start-up phase of a massive new $20 billion
reprocessing factory (Rokkasho). Its reprocessing program is estimated
to cost $166 billion over 40 years (including construction, operating,
and decommissioning costs). Japan has committed itself to keeping its
plutonium supply and demand in balance but Japan already has 40 MT (35
MT in Europe, five MT domestic) supply of plutonium. How can operation
of Rokkasho and failure to implement a domestic MOX program be
presented as balancing supply and demand? Especially when the utilities
are wary of the program? Japanese politicians have spoken in recent
years of making a weapon and one has suggested that Japanese commercial
plutonium stocks could be used to make large numbers of weapons. What
would this mean for global non-proliferation measures? What would this
mean for stability of the region?
A3. It is highly desirable to construct and operate a reprocessing
plant with the plant being part of an integrated system, where the
recovered materials are quickly re-used in nuclear reactors. This is
why the need for an integrated system is stressed, and one needs to
either implement the entire system, or to not implement anything. It is
surely the intent of the Japanese to re-use the recovered plutonium in
their nuclear reactors to help increase the security of this part of
their overall energy supply, although it would appear that there was
not agreement by all parties involved in the government and industry as
to how and when this would be accomplished. As to why the Japanese
utilities are wary of the program, it is difficult to say why without
explicit statements on their part. Presumably a great part of this
concern is the uncertainty in future fuel cycle costs; this is
countered to a degree by the assurance of a domestic fuel supply in a
world economy in which the price of uranium may increase significantly.
Although some Japanese politicians have spoken about constructing a
nuclear weapon, I believe that the context for such comments is likely
to be in response to what the Japanese perceive as an increasing
instability in the region due to the recent actions of China and North
Korea. As a result, comments about global non-proliferation and the
impact to the stability of the region are probably best left to the
diplomats.
It does need to be noted, however, that the Japanese commercial
plutonium stocks are already ill-suited for weapons use, and is part of
the reason that civilian reprocessing activities are only marginally
related to the issue of non-proliferation. Plutonium obtained from
commercial spent fuel with a typical amount of irradiation in the
reactor not only has an isotopic composition that makes weapon
fabrication problematic (although not impossible), but storage of this
plutonium leads to further degradation such that the plutonium would
need to be refined again before weapons use could even be contemplated.
It is likely that such refining may be necessary for the fabrication of
new nuclear fuel as MOX, depending on the storage time. This is one
reason why a mismatch between spent fuel processing rate and the
ability to use the separated plutonium is undesirable, and should be
avoided if possible.
Q4. Dr. Finck, in your presentation before the Advanced Fuel Cycle
Initiative's Semi-Annual Review Meeting in August of 2003, you stated
that, ``Expect that proposed dual tier fuel cycle cannot be made
intrinsically proliferation resistant.'' Why don't you consider UREX-
plus proliferation-resistant? What are the issues here?
A4. I do stand by my statement of 2003. Nevertheless, I never stated
that UREX-plus is not proliferation resistant.
The use of dual tier systems requires that relatively pure streams
of Plutonium and Neptunium be separated from the Spent Nuclear Fuel, as
Light Water Reactors have a limited ability to recycle other materials
such as Americium and fission products. That clean separated material
can be viewed as a proliferation concern. Nevertheless, the same system
can be made proliferation resistant by the use of advanced safeguards
measures, which are currently being vigorously pursued in the AFCI
program. Furthermore, the single tier system, that does not utilize
recycle in thermal reactors, but directly transmutes elements in fast
reactors, can accommodate much less pure mixtures of elements, and
therefore presents interesting proliferation resistance attributes.
Even in this system, we would insist on the incorporation of advanced
safeguards features in fuel cycle facilities.
Q5. You state in your testimony that nuclear energy could produce
process heat that could be used in the production of transportation
fuels such as hydrogen. However, you also included synthetic fuel in
the product slate. What synthetic fuels would be possibly produced at a
nuclear plant?
A5. I apologize if my inclusion of synthetic fuels in the product slate
has created some confusion. The application of nuclear power to the
production of synthetic fuels is to provide either process heat,
electricity or hydrogen, to a plant that is making synthetic fuels from
other feedstocks such as coal or gas. The synthetic fuels are basically
the same concepts that were heavily investigated in the 1970's in
response to the energy crisis at that time, and include coal
gasification and liquid synfuels.
Q6. In your statement (p. 1-2) you say that the U.S. needs to take a
more comprehensive approach to nuclear waste management and you mention
that resource optimization and waste minimization as two objectives
that must be pursued with targeted R&D to minimize their economic
impact. With respect to waste minimization, what is the potential for
reducing the volume and/or heat contained in the waste? What are the
tradeoffs necessary to achieve maximum waste reduction?
A6. For the Yucca Mountain repository, the utilization of space in the
repository is constrained by the amount of decay heat generated in the
spent fuel. If this fuel is processed, and the actinide elements are
removed along with the fission products cesium and strontium, it is
possible to reduce the decay heat of the resulting waste by a factor in
excess of 200. This can be used to greatly increase the utilization of
the Yucca Mountain repository in terms of the amount of space needed to
store the waste resulting from the production of a given amount of
energy. At the same time, a lower total inventory of hazardous
materials is placed in the repository as compared to the current plan
for direct disposal of spent fuel, postponing the need for
consideration of a second repository until the next century or beyond.
Processing of the spent fuel removes the uranium, which accounts
for over 95 percent of the waste volume. Removal of the other actinide
elements accounts for another two percent, while the cesium and
strontium would account for about two percent. As a result, less than
one percent of the original spent fuel material remains for disposal.
The volume required to dispose of this material depends on the waste
form, and is a current area of research. It is anticipated that about a
factor of 50 to 100 reduction in waste content for a given amount of
energy production can be achieved, perhaps greater. This would
translate into an equivalent increase in the utilization of space in
the Yucca Mountain repository.
There are not any ``tradeoffs'' required to achieve these
reductions, although all of the removed materials need to be treated in
some manner and in some respects that can be viewed as the tradeoff:
any materials that are removed need subsequent treatment. The higher
actinide elements can be efficiently recycled in nuclear reactors,
preferably fast neutron reactors, and can be recycled as many times as
required to consume the more troublesome elements. The separated
fission products, cesium and strontium, can be placed in separate
storage for 100-300 years to allow sufficient decay, and then disposed
in the repository with no additional impact. Lest this sound like an
unreasonably long time, it is useful to remember that some spent fuel
has already been in storage for almost 50 years.
Q7. You assert that with a ``significant R&D effort'' new forms can be
developed that can burn up to 50 percent of the plutonium and neptunium
present in the spent nuclear fuel. What are the R&D challenges to being
able to achieve a burn rate at this level?
A7. These consumption amounts in a single irradiation in a light water
reactor can only be achieved with the development of what is known as
``inert matrix fuel'' or IMF. This fuel consists only of recycled
materials, and uses an inert matrix material for the rest of the
required fuel volume instead of using additional natural or depleted
uranium. In this way, further creation of higher actinide elements from
the uranium is avoided, and the recycled materials provide the only
fission sources. The R&D challenges center on the development of an
appropriate inert matrix material, which has become more complicated as
explained in the next paragraph. This approach was briefly in favor for
certain applications, such as the destruction of weapons-grade
plutonium, and has been examined in the DOE AFCI program as a potential
approach for recycling the higher actinide elements.
However, detailed studies have shown that the IMF approach does not
provide substantial benefits either to waste management or resource
utilization by itself, but would also need to be recycled to provide
the opportunity for greater benefits. The major difficulty is in
formulating an inert matrix that can be reprocessed easily, and is the
subject of some ongoing research. It should be noted, though, that even
if such a fuel form can be developed, the utility of the IMF approach
is greatly inferior to that of the fast neutron reactors. For this
reason, the IMF approach is not being actively considered for either
the single tier or dual tier strategy. An advanced LWR with MOX-type
fuel can already be implemented as the first tier of the dual tier
strategy with maximum overall benefit, and the IMF approach would not
add to this benefit.
Q8. The U.S. has entered into an international framework agreement for
the development of the Generation IV nuclear reactor. Is the
reprocessing necessary for this reactor design covered under the
agreement? If not, why not? What other countries are engaged in
reprocessing R&D for the Gen IV reactors?
A8. The reprocessing activities associated with the Gen IV reactors are
the same as are being discussed here, as are the advanced reactors
being considered in the DOE AFCI program for a single tier or dual tier
system. All of the fast reactor concepts that would be part of a two
tier system are represented in the Gen IV program.
As for the other countries that are engaged in reprocessing R&D,
virtually all of the members of the Gen IV International Forum are
conducting research to one degree or another. The most active members
in this area are France and Japan along with the United States. We have
active technical collaboration agreements in place with a number of
countries involved in the development of reprocessing technologies for
advanced nuclear reactors.