http://www.ips-dc.org/articles/nuclear_recycling_fails_the_testNuclear Recycling Fails the Test
July 2, 2008 · By Robert Alvarez. Edited by Miriam Pemberton
The debate over nuclear power is heating up, along with the planet. Can nuclear fuel recycling be part of the mix? Not a chance.
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Recycled Uranium
In 2007 the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that “reprocessed uranium currently plays a very minor role in satisfying world uranium requirements for power reactors.” In 2004, about 2 percent of uranium reactor fuel in France came from recycling, and it appears that it now has dwindled to zero. There are several reasons for this.
Uranium, which makes up about 95 percent of spent fuel, cannot be reused in the great majority of reactors without increasing the levels of a key source of energy, uranium 235, from 1 to 4 percent, through a complex and expensive enrichment process.
Reprocessed uranium also contains undesirable elements that make it highly radioactive and reduces the efficiency of the fuel. For instance, the build up of uranium 232 and uranium 234 in spent fuel creates a radiation hazard requiring extraordinary measures to protect workers. Levels of uranium-236 in used fuel impede atom splitting; and to compensate for this “poison, recycled uranium has to undergo costly “over-enrichment.” Contaminants in reprocessed uranium also foul up enrichment and processing facilities, as well as new fuel. Once it is recycled in a reactor, larger amounts of undesirable elements build up – increasing the expense of reuse, storage and disposal. Given these problems, it’s no surprise that DOE plans include disposal of future reprocessed uranium in landfills, instead of recycling.
Costs
As a senior energy adviser in the Clinton administration, I recall attending a briefing in 1996 by the National Academy of Sciences on the feasibility of recycling nuclear fuel. I'd been intrigued by the idea because of its promise to eliminate weapons-usable plutonium and to reduce the amount of waste that had to be buried, where it could conceivably seep into drinking water at some point in its multimillion-year-long half-lives.
But then came the Academy's unequivocal conclusion: the idea was supremely impractical. It would cost up to $500 billion in 1996 dollars and take 150 years to accomplish the transmutation of plutonium and other dangerous long-lived radioactive toxins. Ten years later the idea remains as costly and technologically unfeasible as it was in the 1990s. In 2007 the Academy once again tossed cold water on the Bush administration’s effort to jump start nuclear recycling by concluding that “there is no economic justification for going forward with this program at anything approaching a commercial scale.”
Meanwhile, the client base for Areva, the French nuclear recycling company, has shrunk to one new contract for a relatively small amount of spent fuel from the Netherlands. Most revealing is that its main customer, the French utility, Electricité de France, is balking at doing further business unless the price goes down – something that Areva says it can’t do. It appears that even the French may be starting to say no instead of oui.