WASHINGTON, D.C. – The head of the U.S. Energy Department’s Office of Nuclear Energy on Monday said she was committed to studying the potential use of advanced reactors in recycling radioactive spent fuel from nuclear power plants.
Assistant Energy Secretary for Nuclear Energy Rita Baranwal, though, said that storage and permanent disposal of that waste also remain viable options for consideration.
“First I’m trying to understand all of the options that are we have available to us,” Baranwal said during a keynote address to the American Nuclear Society’s 2019 Winter Meeting here. “I want to be clear about what we’re doing in the office: Yucca Mountain is still certainly on the table, it’s just based on what Congress directs us to do, so that is still certainly an option.”
Since taking over at the Office of Nuclear Energy in June, the materials engineer and nuclear industry veteran has regularly lamented the fact that the United States has not found a financially viable way to reuse its spent nuclear fuel.
The Energy Department is legally responsible under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act for managing that stockpile of waste, which stands at over 80,000 metric tons and grows by roughly 2,000 metric tons each year. That material now remains stranded at dozens of nuclear power plants around the nation.
Used fuel maintains up to 95% of its original energy.
The United States’ sole commercial nuclear fuel recycling facility operated from 1966 to 1972 in West Valley, N.Y., under Nuclear Fuel Services Inc. During that period the company reprocessed 640 metric tons of used fuel from federal defense reactors and privately operated power plants, according to New York state. Nuclear Fuel Services took the plant offline in 1972 to make upgrades, but then determined it could not return to operations in a commercially reasonable fashion in the wake of new regulatory directives for earthquake and tornado safety.
India’s first successful nuclear test explosion in 1974 generated proliferation fears that further dampened enthusiasm for reprocessing, Steve Nesbit, a nuclear industry consultant and former executive with Duke Energy, said during a Tuesday session at the ANS meeting. Reprocessing separates plutonium from the used fuel; that material can then be used again for nuclear power production, but could also be diverted to power nuclear weapons.
Then-President Gerald Ford placed a temporary prohibition on reprocessing in 1976, and President Jimmy Carter instituted a full ban in 1977.
“Those bans essentially spelled the death knell for commercial reprocessing in the United States,” Nesbit said. President Ronald Reagan eventually lifted the ban in 1981, “but by that time the ship had sailed on reprocessing,” he added.
For decades, the federal government has instead focused on burying the material in a geologic repository. It has made limited progress toward this goal, with the Energy Department still lacking a license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build and operate a disposal facility at its preferred location under Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
The Obama administration’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, in its 2012 report, said that any fuel recycling option would still produce waste. Some of that would encompass long-lived radioactive elements that would require disposal, according to the expert panel that included future Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.
The American Nuclear Society, though, has supported a new look at recycling. In a 2015 position paper, the nonprofit professional organization for the nuclear industry said there is limited difference in the costs of used-fuel disposal and spent-fuel recycling within the total nuclear energy life cycle. Improved safeguards can also deter the threat of proliferation, it said.
The organization said work should begin now, given increasing energy needs worldwide and the two to three decades that would be necessary to establish an industrial-scale reprocessing and recycling operation.
In her presentation, Baranwal placed a fresh look at reprocessing within four priorities for the Office of Nuclear Energy: sustaining the United States’ existing nuclear power fleet; putting advanced nuclear technology “across the finish line,” with a demonstration system ready by 2025; preparing and sustaining a critical fuel cycle infrastructure, including recycling; and augmenting the United States’ competitiveness in nuclear power on the global level.
Baranwal said she was inspired by a visit last month to the La Hague reprocessing plant in France. The nation recycles 96% of its spent fuel, with the remaining “most hazardous isotopes” converted into a glass form for disposal.
“So I will be exploring options for dealing with our used commercial nuclear fuel and looking for ways to enable recycling in our advanced reactors in the future,” she said.
Baranwal did not discuss details of this effort, but said reprocessing would receive “some additional focus given to recycling because it has not been done in the recent past.”
The Office of Nuclear Energy did not respond by deadline to questions seeking details about this effort.
Prior to becoming assistant secretary for nuclear energy, Baranwal spent nearly three years as director of DOE’s Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear Energy program. Prior to that, she was a director for Westinghouse Electric for just shy of nine years and a manager at the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in Pennsylvania for nearly three years.
Baranwal’s office would nominally be in charge of oversight of storage or disposal of nuclear waste. For the current fiscal 2020, DOE requested $116 million for this work. Nearly all of that would have been used to resume licensing of the waste repository at Yucca Mountain, which the Obama administration defunded nearly a decade ago.
Appropriators in both chambers of Congress rejected that proposal, instead recommending funding and programs to advance interim storage of used fuel. Congress has yet to finalize its budget for the federal fiscal year that began Oct. 1, instead keeping the government running on short-term budget measures.
