The Department of Energy remains in the early stages of studying potential options for recycling used nuclear power plant fuel, Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Rita Baranwal said Wednesday.
“To look at the option of recycling and what falls under that umbrella, is something that my team has started to do,” Baranwal said during a plenary session for the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management’s online-only annual meeting. “So I don’t have particular options to talk about today. I will say that we’re entertaining a variety of options and a lot of things are on the table.”
In previous public events, Baranwal has mentioned the possibility of using an existing facility in another nation to reprocess U.S. spent fuel so that it can be used again in nuclear facilities. She did not discuss that option Wednesday, but did mention an October 2019 visit to the La Hague reprocessing operation in France.
There is no timeline for a potential recycling demonstration project, Baranwal said during the question-and-answer segment of her discussion.
Baranwal, a materials engineer with a professional background in nuclear fuel production, has noted regularly since taking office in July 2019 that used reactor fuel retains 95% of its potential energy. The United States today holds in excess of 80,000 metric tons of the radioactive material, almost all of it kept on-site at the power facilities where it was generated.
The Energy Department is more than 22 years past the Jan. 31, 1998, deadline set by Congress to begin disposal of spent fuel. However, it still does not have anywhere to put it, and the Trump administration this year quit trying to revive DOE’s moribund license application for a geologic repository under Yucca Mountain, Nev.
Meanwhile, it has been nearly 50 years since the closure of the United States’ sole commercial reprocessing plant, operated by Nuclear Fuel Services from 1966 to 1972 in West Valley, N.Y. A small number of subsequent initiatives never got off the ground, running into presidential directives against reprocessing, the economics of an operation, and concerns about potential proliferation of weapon-usable plutonium that would be extracted as part of the process.
Economics, nonproliferation, and technical issues will all be considered as the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy studies reprocessing, according to Baranwal.
There are upward of 60 separate projects in North America to develop small-modular reactors and other new reactor types. But if U.S. nuclear companies want to compete in the global market for advanced power reactors, they must be able to offer takeback of the used fuel, Baranwal said. That means being able to do something with it.
“Certainly conditions could be different five years from now, 10 years from now, than they are today, than they were 10 years ago,” she said. “And so I want kind of a broad scope of the economic conditions that would need to exist for this to be favorable. Right now it may not be favorable, just economics-wise, but that may not be the only driver.”
The primary mission of Baranwal’s office, and its current $1.4 billion budget, is to support the United States’ existing nuclear power fleet and to advance development of new technologies for the marketplace. However, it would nominally be in charge of managing disposal of the spent fuel inventory – provided Congress appropriated money for that mission.
For the current fiscal 2020, Congress rejected the White House proposal to revive DOE’s 2008 license application for Yucca Mountain with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. That proceeding has been frozen for a decade since being defunded by the Obama administration.
Legislators late last year also eliminated funding and language proposed in the House and Senate to kick-start a federal program for centralized interim storage of spent fuel, to begin taking it off nuclear utilities’ hands. The Energy Department is seeking $27.5 million for such a program for the upcoming 2021 federal budget year, and the House Appropriations Committee on Monday signed off on the request in its latest energy and water bill.
In March, Baranwal told a House Appropriations panel that her office was preparing a request for proposals for basic design of an interim storage facility. “That has been prepared and we hope to release that in the near future,” she said Wednesday in response to a question from RadWaste Monitor.
Baranwal did not elaborate. The Energy Department did not respond to a query by deadline Friday regarding the timing of the procurement notice or whether it would be funded under the 2021 interim storage program.
