WASHINGTON, D.C. – New Assistant Energy Secretary for Nuclear Energy Rita Baranwal said Tuesday she hopes to consider whether reviving long-dormant U.S. recycling of spent nuclear fuel could provide a feasible alternative to the federal government’s current plan to bury it underground forever.
“I don’t think we have a waste issue. We have a treasure trove of 95% unused fuel that needs to be looked at, whether that’s recycling, reprocessing, reusing,” Baranwal said during the question-and-answer segment of her keynote address to the Nuclear Industry Council’s New Nuclear Capital conference. “I think it’s a shame that we are immediately jumping to storing it somewhere, perhaps permanently.”
Roughly 80,000 metric tons of radioactive spent fuel is now stored at nuclear power plants around the nation. That stockpile grows by about 2,000 metric tons per year. The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, as amended in 1987, directs the Department of Energy to dispose of that material permanently in a geologic repository under Yucca Mountain, Nev. That approach, for now at least, remains unlicensed and unfunded.
Spent fuel was shipped decades ago to just two U.S. reprocessing plants: Nuclear Fuel Services’ site at West Valley, N.Y., which operated from 1966 to 1972; and a General Electric facility in Morris, Ill., that was built but never received a federal reprocessing license.
President Jimmy Carter in 1977 placed a deferral on U.S. commercial spent fuel reprocessing, worried about the potential for proliferation of recycled plutonium. His successor, Ronald Reagan, lifted the prohibition in 1981, but the approach never took off.
Baranwal, who has three degrees in materials engineering, said she hopes to use her background in root-cause analysis “to look at the used fuel discussion.”
This was Baranwal’s first public address since she was sworn in last Thursday to lead DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy. Previously, she spent more than a decade in the nuclear industry and then led the department’s Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) program from August 2016.
