WASHINGTON, July 28 (UPI) -- The United States has long been a world leader in the nuclear field, except when it comes to the recycling of nuclear waste, but a recent study conducted by Boston Consulting Group indicates that starting such a program would be more economical than previously thought.
Indeed, the U.S. Department of Energy has acknowledged through the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership initiative that the country needs to join France, Britain, Russia and Japan in operating nuclear fuel recycling programs.
The projected growth of energy demand for the United States has necessitated consideration of a move from a once-through nuclear fuel cell cycle to a closed-cycle, meaning reprocessing and recycling. The United States produces its nuclear fuel from newly mined uranium or from blended-down nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Union, a supply that is dwindling.
Nuclear power accounts for 20 to 25 percent of the U.S. energy supply, but by 2025 this percentage will drop to 14 if the country's nuclear facilities are not expanded, former Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham said last month.
The AREVA group, a nuclear energy company where Abraham serves as chairman, commissioned the Boston Consulting study and operates a spent nuclear fuel recycling facility in La Hague, France, which the study used as a working model. The study concluded that using a combination repository and recycling approach will maximize the U.S. nuclear energy supply and its capacity to store waste at a price that is comparable to the cost of using just a repository alone.
The report estimated the total Greenfield cost of recycling at $520 per kilogram of waste, and the total cost of the use of a repository such as the Yucca Mountain site at $500 per kilogram. Rick Peters, senior vice president and the head of Boston Consulting's worldwide energy practice, said that given the amount of uncertainties in the capital investments that would be needed to fund recycling or a repository, it is reasonable to consider the costs comparable, as they are within 10 percent of each other.
Recycling of nuclear waste has been legal since President Reagan lifted the ban on reprocessing of nuclear material in 1981, but nonproliferation concerns and the belief that recycling and reprocessing would be too costly had prevented the idea of using a closed-fuel cell cycle from taking hold. Domestic proliferation concerns arise from the fact that uranium or plutonium in spent nuclear fuel can be extracted and enriched to create weapons if the material was stolen.
Dennis Spurgeon, assistant secretary for nuclear energy at the Department of Energy, said that such a recycling facility would not pose a proliferation issue.
"One thing that we have established in the department is that we do not promote the separation of pure plutonium, meaning something that could be used directly as a weapon," Spurgeon told United Press International. "The idea that something could be built like this is not a proliferation issue."
No new nuclear plant has been built in the United States since the early 1980s. Greenhouse-gas-producing fuels such as gas and coal cannot environmentally be used to meet the country's increasing energy demand, leading the DOE to look at construction of new nuclear facilities and the development of a recycling program in conjunction with the use of Yucca Mountain as a waste repository.
In previous studies, Peters said, recycling did not prove as comparable in cost to a repository because higher capital costs were used for the recycling plant, as well as different densification factors for the waste, a measure of the ability to store the material. The report estimated the cost of building a nuclear waste recycling plant in the United States at about $16 billion.
Spurgeon said he is confident in the economic data that the consulting group used.
"This is the first report that I've seen in some time that has been done by an independent organization with access to very inside information from an actual company involved in reprocessing," Spurgeon told UPI.
"We have a validation that we're in the ballpark. Basically, it's a validation of the GNEP program, which is designed to increase the effective capacity of the repository by going through some of the radioactive isotopes that pose the long term issues for the repositories."
Despite the Energy Department's confidence in the report and its plan to pursue a recycling strategy, Steven Kraft, director of used fuel management at the Nuclear Energy Institute, said he is not sure the economic estimates would be consistent with the future reality of uranium prices and other factors.
"There may very well be something here, and it bears some additional thought, but it hasn't been tested in the market yet," Kraft told UPI. "Many times these ideas have to pass the test of the marketplace. When we go through the report, we see things like financing rates like they're looking for government support or inflation rates that are favorable.
"What that tells us is that the economics might work, but a lot of things have to be right."
Spurgeon acknowledged that the government would assist in funding a recycling facility in the future.
The study assumed the use of the most advanced recycling and reprocessing technology available, the latest version of the Universal Extraction process, which uses one step to remove several radioactive elements at a time from nuclear waste. This technology has been developed but is not yet in use at any of the world's four recycling facilities. An advantage of the advanced extraction process is that it can separate plutonium from waste that is only three or four years old, as opposed to current processes that can only spent fuel that is 15 years old. Waste that is recycled sooner is just as toxic, but not as hot, which means that more could be stored in the repository. Thus recycling allows the maximum amount of energy to be obtained from a single nuclear fuel cell, while also increasing the storage capacity of repository sites, which must eventually be used for nuclear waste even with recycling.
In February, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman announced the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, calling for the expansion of nuclear power facilities and the global exchange of recycled nuclear energy in a manner that ensures nonproliferation. The Energy Department released a spent nuclear fuel recycling program plan in May outlining its timeline for the development of recycling facilities.
This year the department plans to accelerate the Advanced Fuel Cell Initiative, which began in 2003 and is a project to develop the extraction of energy from nuclear waste for potential use in the national power grid. The plan projected that commercial-scale demonstration of a recycling and reprocessing facility could be ready within 20 to 25 years.
Spent nuclear fuel in the United States is stored at the individual reactor sites where it is produced. As of December 2005, the total amount of spent fuel kept at nuclear reactor sites in the United States was about 53,000 metric tons, according to Energy Department estimates, and this amount grows by 2,100 metric tons per year. At this rate, the department projects, by 2010 the amount of stored spent fuel will equal the maximum amount that Yucca Mountain can store under current law.
Spurgeon said that he could see possible use of a recycling facility in the United States by Yucca's projected opening in 2017.
"I think you can anticipate in the future that we will be requesting information from industry in expressing interest as we move forward, and certainly AREVA is one of the companies that will express interest," he said.
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