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.
Meanwhile, used fuel can hold up to 95% of the original energy in its fissile uranium. Japan, the United Kingdom, and other countries have reclaimed some of that energy through reprocessing, but the technology never got far in the United States.
Nuclear Fuel Services’ site at West Valley, N.Y., only operated from 1966 to 1972, while a General Electric facility in Morris, Ill., was built but never received a federal reprocessing license. An Allied-General Nuclear Services plant in Barnwell, S.C., was also never licensed after President Jimmy Carter in 1977 placed a deferral on U.S. commercial spent fuel reprocessing, worried about the potential for proliferation of recycled plutonium.
Carter’s 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. I really do want to consider revisiting, or visiting perhaps for the first time, what we do with the energy that is sitting at every utility and only 5% used.”
This was Baranwal’s first public address since she was sworn in on July 11 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.
Baranwal focused her comments Tuesday on the Office of Nuclear Energy’s core mission: Supporting the existing U.S. nuclear power fleet and promoting development of new reactor technologies. She said her office is preparing a new strategic plan regarding its operations, but did not say whether it would involve reconsideration of spent fuel recycling. Additional detail on the strategic plan was not immediately available.
The Department of Energy budget plan for fiscal 2020 features a line item for used nuclear fuel disposition research and development, but it is focused on programs for storage, transportation, and permanent disposal of the waste. The department proposed just $5 million for the program in the budget year that begins Oct. 1, down from the $50.7 million appropriated by Congress in the current fiscal year. None of the money in either year is aimed at reprocessing.
Multiple studies have determined that direct disposal of used fuel would be significantly less expensive than reprocessing, based on expenses including construction of recycling facilities. In 2007, then-Congressional Budget Office Director Peter Orszag cited two reports that estimated reprocessing would cost $585 per kilogram, roughly 6% more than direct disposal, or $1,300 per kilogram, over double the expense of direct disposal.
“From its analysis of those and other studies, CBO concludes that for the roughly 2,200 metric tons of spent fuel produced each year in the United States, the reprocessing alternative would be likely to cost at least $5 billion more in present-value terms than the direct-disposal alternative over the life of a reprocessing plant,” Orszag said in prepared testimony before a Senate committee. “The cost of reprocessing would be at least 25 percent greater than the cost of direct disposal.”
The idea, though, has not fully faded from view, as illustrated by this 2012 article on new recycling techniques developed at the Energy Department’s Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. In 2006, earlier, DOE announced up to $16 million in grants for 11 groups to conduct siting research at locations including Barnwell and Morris for “integrated spent fuel recycling facilities.”
The U.S. nuclear industry’s “policy principles” for used fuel management do not directly address recycling, as of a 2015 update from its Washington, D.C.-based trade association, the Nuclear Energy Institute. However, NEI said its support for research and development into advanced fuel cycles could apply to fuel reprocessing or recycling.
“We have long supported research and development into advanced fuel cycle technologies, which is why we appreciate Assistant Secretary Baranwal’s interest in this topic,” John Kotek, NEI vice president of policy development and public affairs and a former principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy, said in a statement to RadWaste Monitor. “We also look forward to working with her to preserve our existing nuclear carbon-free generation, to create a pathway to development and deployment of new nuclear energy technologies and to advance used fuel management policies that pave the way for the expanded use of nuclear energy, America’s largest emission-free power source.”
