Power Hungry (42 page)

A Smashing Idea for Nuclear Waste

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HE BIGGEST PROBLEM facing the future of nuclear power isn't science, cost, or how to handle the issue of radioactive waste. Instead, it's the equivocators. And those equivocators invariably seize on the issue of nuclear waste as the reason why the United States cannot pursue nuclear power. For instance, during a February 2009 speech in Houston, Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said that “all of us need to be open-minded about nuclear power as part of the solution.”
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Krupp's equivocation came immediately afterward: “Having said that, I'm not ready to call for a new wave of construction because there are some very legitimate concerns not only about costs but also about nuclear waste.... It's partly technical and it's partly political as to what we do with the waste. I think we need to come up with those answers.”
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The answers are here. What's lacking aren't answers, but political will. That's not to say the challenge of handling nuclear waste can be solved easily or cheaply. Coming up with a long-term solution will take years of work, lots of money, and sustained support from Congress. And that's the crux of the problem: Nuclear power requires strong governmental involvement. One analyst summed it up well when he told me, “The Republicans like nuclear, but they hate government. The Democrats like government but they hate nuclear power.” And those conflicting views
have contributed to the stalemate on nuclear power development in the United States.

That stalemate is most obvious when it comes to dealing with nuclear waste. In 2009, the Obama administration—bowing to pressure from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who hails from Nevada—decimated funding for the waste disposal site at Yucca Mountain. Administration officials said they were abandoning the project and would begin looking for other waste sites.
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Reid's political power play has left the United States without a long-term program—or even the beginnings of one—to deal with its spent nuclear fuel.
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Reid's NIMBY posturing may be handy politics for Nevada, but it effectively renders moot a twodecade-old federal law that requires the federal government to take possession of the high-level waste produced by the country's nuclear power plants. It also means that the two decades and $13.5 billion of taxpayers' money that has been spent researching and developing the site at Yucca Mountain (which is ready for use and only awaits licensing) has effectively gone up in smoke—thereby adding just a bit more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
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In their 2008 political platform the Republicans called nuclear energy the “most reliable zero-carbon-emissions source of energy that we have.” The GOP went on, saying that “unwarranted fear mongering” has prevented the country from starting a new reactor for more than three decades.
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Meanwhile, in the Democrats' 2008 political platform, the phrase “nuclear power” occurs exactly one time—and refers only to the spread of nuclear weapons. The Democrats' discussion of nuclear power focuses almost exclusively on the issues of proliferation and the threat of Iran and North Korea having nuclear weapons. Furthermore, the Democrats made their opposition to the waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, clear, saying “We will protect Nevada and its communities from the high-level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, which has not been proven to be safe by sound science.”
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The Democratic platform does two things that have become common in the fight over nuclear waste disposal: It conflates the issue of nuclear power with nuclear weapons proliferation, and it restates the canard that nuclear waste cannot be handled safely. This practice of equating nuclear
power with weapons proliferation extends back to the 1970s, when Jimmy Carter halted the recycling of spent fuel rods from nuclear power plants. Carter claimed that recycling the fuel would lead to the spread of plutonium. But there is no connection whatsoever between the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel in the United States with the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Although Carter killed America's waste reprocessing plant (then being built at Barnwell, South Carolina), France, Russia, England, Canada, and Japan all continued with their waste reprocessing operations. By doing so, those countries reduced the volume of their high-level nuclear waste. In addition, reprocessing recovers valuable fuel.
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About 95 percent of the material contained in the spent fuel rods that come out of nuclear reactors can be reused. During reprocessing, that material—about 1 percent of which is plutonium—is captured and used to produce mixed oxide fuel (called MOX) that can then be burned in nuclear reactors to generate more electricity.
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Of course, the plutonium recovered during reprocessing could, in theory, be used to make a weapon, and some antinuclear groups have used that fact as a reason to oppose the use of nuclear power. For instance, the Rocky Mountain Institute has declared that commercial nuclear power is the “biggest driving force” behind nuclear proliferation and that it provides “do-it-yourself bomb kits—nearly all the needed materials, skills, knowledge, and equipment—in innocent-looking civilian disguise.”
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Associating nuclear power with nuclear weapons requires ignoring the obvious: Several countries have developed nuclear weapons without even thinking about producing electricity. If a country wants an atomic bomb, they can build one with or without a nuclear power program. During World War II, the United States developed the atom bomb. It took another decade or so for the nation to begin using fission to produce electricity. Other countries, including France, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan, all developed nuclear weapons before they developed nuclear power. And of those four, only France is now producing significant amounts of electricity with fission. Since 1945, a new nation has been able to build or acquire a nuclear weapon about every five years.
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The world's leading countries may not want Iran to have such a weapon, but the unfortunate reality is that the knowledge that allows countries to
build nuclear bombs has diffused to the point that nuclear proliferation has become a fact of the modern world. The problem of nuclear proliferation has been a key challenge in global geopolitics since the end of World War II. Properly addressing it will take concerted international effort, and a central part of that effort must be U.S. leadership on the issues of nuclear fuel and proper handling and disposal of nuclear waste.

The United States has been stockpiling its nuclear waste for decades while debating what to do, but the debate continues to ignore one of the best options: “integrated energy parks.” The idea, now being promoted by some officials inside the Department of Energy, would allow the nation to use its own real estate for interim nuclear waste storage. The parks could also be used as locations for new nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel reprocessing.

The U.S. Department of Energy's nuclear-focused national laboratories—Los Alamos, Idaho, Savannah River, Sandia, and Oak Ridge—have decades of experience with nuclear materials and technologies. The communities near the labs are familiar with nuclear issues and are interested in keeping the jobs that the labs provide. Perhaps most important, the nuclear-focused national labs already have the essential security and safety systems in place. Using the integrated energy parks to store nuclear waste would allow the federal government to fulfill its obligations under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which requires the DOE to take and dispose of the waste from nuclear power plants.
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Today, the United States has thousands of tons of nuclear waste spread among 121 different locations across the country. Consolidating that waste at the national laboratories would improve overall security, allow the federal government to comply with the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, and legitimize the concept of using those sites as integrated energy parks, where the waste could be stored indefinitely in dry casks. When the nation finally musters the political will to do something with the waste, it could then be reprocessed at those same sites. After reprocessing, the fuel could be used in reactors built on the very same properties.

That brings us to another key point: Nuclear reactors are not the problem when it comes to nuclear weapons proliferation, they are part of the solution. In June 2009, Stewart Brand, the longtime environmental activist—as well as an ardent backer of nuclear power—declared that
“nuclear energy has done more to dismantle weapons than any other activity.”
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Since the mid-1990s, Russia has been shipping bomb-grade nuclear material from dismantled warheads to the United States, where it is being converted into fuel for use in commercial reactors. By mid-2009, the program, called “megatons to megawatts,” had eliminated the equivalent of nearly 15,000 nuclear warheads.
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That program will continue for years to come. As it continues producing electricity from the world's nuclear weapons stockpiles, it will be making the world a safer place.

The megatons to megawatts program is laudable, and yet the United States must begin developing a long-term solution for nuclear waste disposal. One intriguing option involves using transmutation to destroy the most worrisome segments of the radioactive waste stream. Transmutation—a process that involves transforming long-lived radioactive isotopes into ones with shorter half-lives—reduces the toxicity of the materials that come out of nuclear reactors.
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Using transmutation has at least three advantages: The most dangerous materials, such as plutonium, are burned rather than stored, thereby minimizing the proliferation risk; the process reduces the amount of dangerous wastes produced by fission reactors, thereby reducing the number of long-term repositories needed to handle the waste; and finally, it reduces the long-term toxicity of the final waste products from millennia down to centuries or decades.

Before discussing transmutation, I need to explain the basics of nuclear waste. Today, all of the waste that comes out of America's nuclear reactors uses the “open” or “once through” fuel cycle. The cheapest method of handling waste, the open fuel cycle takes the spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors and stores them in spent-fuel pools or sealed metal casks for several years. From there, the waste is supposed to go into a permanent central waste repository such as Yucca Mountain, where it will remain, in theory, forever.
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Meanwhile, France and several other countries take a different tack, reprocessing the waste that comes out of their reactors. Doing so is more expensive than employing the open fuel cycle but makes better use of the energy potential in the spent fuel rods. Reprocessing, which involves capturing the uranium and other materials so that they can be sent through the reactors again, reduces the volume of waste by a factor of two or three.

Regardless of whether the spent fuel rods are reprocessed or not, the final result is a stream of highly radioactive waste that must be buried somewhere and kept safe for millennia. If that waste is buried without further treatment, then the relatively short-term radioactivity of the fission products, such as cesium and strontium, is greatly reduced after about a hundred years. At that time, says Swadesh Mahajan, a thermonuclear physicist at the Institute for Fusion Studies at the University of Texas, the repository will be, in effect, “a plutonium mine,” because the spent fuel rods will still contain significant quantities of the bomb-making material as well as other isotopes that can be made to undergo fission relatively easily. And that's why Mahajan and several other nuclear scientists around the world are rallying around the concept of transmutation.

“Burying the waste isn't enough,” says Mahajan. “We must reduce the quantity and therefore the long-term biohazards associated with the toxic waste. Doing so cuts the number of final repositories for the waste, which is critical. But it also cuts the long-term risk of proliferation.”
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The key ingredient needed to make transmutation viable: neutrons—the uncharged particles that make up half or more of the mass in an atom. Given a good source of “fast” or high-energy neutrons, the most troublesome nuclear waste could be effectively burned. And the process of burning the waste also produces significant quantities of energy that can be captured to produce electricity. There are several methods for producing the fast neutrons needed for transmutation, but one promising technology appears to be a hybrid reactor that combines both fusion and fission.

Fusion's reputation has been tarnished by an excess of hype. Just like fuel cell–powered cars and the hydrogen economy, producing electricity from fusion has been touted as the Next Big Thing for decades. But the hybrid fusion reactors now being discussed are not designed for electricity production. Instead, their main purpose would be the production of fast neutrons, a process that is far less technically demanding.

Those fast neutrons would be used to bombard the most problematic wastes, including plutonium, americium, curium, and neptunium, which have very long half-lives. (Neptunium's half-life is 2 million years.)
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That bombardment forces the radioactive atoms to undergo fission, which turns them into lighter elements and isotopes that decay much more rapidly.
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The idea of using a fusion-fission system has been promoted by two Nobel Prize–winning-scientists: Andrei Sakharov and Hans Bethe. Sakharov, a Soviet-era physicist who is best-known for his brave advocacy for human rights and freedom, proposed a fusion-fission system back in 1950.
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Bethe, the 1967 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics, was German American and worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He advocated the use of the fusion-fission hybrid as a way to create additional nuclear fuel and also saw that model as a method of dealing with high-level nuclear waste, saying it could provide “a great advantage for the prevention of proliferation of nuclear weapons.”
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