US DOE science advisor urges quick action on spent nuclear fuel
Washington (Platts)--21Sep2010
The senior advisor in the US Department of Energy's Office of Science
told the government's blue ribbon commission on nuclear waste Tuesday it is
"important to move ahead" with a path for utility spent fuel stored at nuclear
power plants and "to move rapidly."
Climate change is driving the need for quick action, DOE's Victor Reis
told the panel.
President Barack Obama's administration established the commission in
2009 to evaluate alternatives to the Yucca Mountain repository project in
Nevada.
DOE plans to terminate that program September 30 due to unrelenting
opposition by the state of Nevada and has said that neither the site nor the
repository license application it submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission two years ago is technically flawed.
The commission is scheduled to submit its recommendations to DOE in
January 2012.
Reis and other speakers stressed in presentations to the commission the
need for the US' new waste management strategy to be flexible and that no
options should be ruled out.
A repository from which spent fuel can be retrieved, or removed, would
leave the option open for reprocessing without waiting for a spent fuel
reprocessing option to be in place before moving that waste from power reactor
sites, Frank von Hipple, a professor of public and international affairs at
Princeton University, told the panel.
Spent fuel can be removed from the repository if a reprocessing program
is put in place, von Hipple said. "Countries that reprocess have had no more
luck in siting repositories" than countries that do not, he added.
Reis echoed comments blue ribbon commissioner Ernest Moniz made earlier
Tuesday when he noted that a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study
released last week found that reprocessing is not a realistic option.
Moniz, a physics professor at MIT, headed the study. The amount of
uranium available makes reprocessing unrealistic, according to Reis and Moniz.
"We're not going to do reprocessing in this country," said Reis, calling it
uneconomical.
Both Reis and Andrew Kadak, an MIT nuclear engineering professor, told
the panel that a repository could be built as a disposal facility but used to
store spent fuel underground.
If the US decides not to pursue reprocessing, the repository then could
be used as a disposal facility, Reis said.
Reis suggested that the US focus its search for a repository on salt
sites, noting that the US already operates a deep-geologic repository in a
saltbed near Carlsbad, New Mexico. The facility, know as the Waste Isolation
Pilot Plant, is used to dispose of transuranic defense waste.
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