A university report published this week that raised concerns about waste streams from advanced reactors distracts from the larger issues facing nuclear waste management across the globe, a nuclear power expert told RadWaste Monitor this week.
“The technical content of the study obfuscates from the fact that waste is predominantly a political rather than a technical problem,” Alan Ahn, senior resident fellow for climate and energy at center-left think tank Third Way, told RadWaste Monitor during an interview Wednesday.
The report, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a Stanford University-led research group, concluded that, among other things, small modular reactors (SMRs) would produce a greater waste volume than conventional nuclear reactors, and that the spent fuel from such reactors would be around 50% more radioactive. The research team studied reactor designs from companies such as NuScale, Toshiba and Terrestrial Energy.
Stanford’s conclusions, in Ahn’s opinion, distract from the primary issue facing countries looking to close the nuclear fuel cycle: building a spent-fuel repository.
“I don’t know if any change in waste volume or waste form complexity would have any appreciable effect on the broader or more significant political challenges that countries have had siting spent fuel repositories,” Ahn said.
Ahn also complained that the Stanford team was vague in its claim that managing spent fuel from SMRs would create significant treatment and disposal expenses. The cost of treating spent fuel from advanced reactors is “unlikely to be significant” compared with the costs of building and operating such facilities.
“If we’re talking about a broader need for nuclear for climate issues, I think it’s certainly a reasonable cost to pay,” Ahn said.
Meanwhile, NuScale, one of the advanced reactor companies implicated in Stanford’s report, sought this week to distance itself from the researchers’ findings.
NuScale’s SMR design “does not create waste and material streams that are novel to the nuclear power industry,” a spokesperson for the company told RadWaste Monitor in a statement Wednesday. The chemical and physical characteristics of spent fuel from NuScale’s SMR are similar to those of waste from conventional nuclear reactors, the spokesperson said.
NuScale also pushed back on the report’s claim that its SMR’s spent fuel could not be safely stored in a repository alongside conventional waste.
“[T]he waste management practices of this type of fuel are very well-established, unlike the radioactive waste that would result from non-light water advanced reactors with novel fuel designs,” NuScale said.
The Stanford report’s conclusions “do not apply to NuScale’s technology,” the spokesperson told RadWaste Monitor.
NuScale is waiting on final approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to start building its SMR. The company in 2021 signed an agreement with Grant County, Wash., to work on advanced nuclear power and NuScale is also cooperating with a public utility commission in Utah to develop a similar facility by 2029.
