Why GNEP Can’t Jump To The Future
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Congress is now considering whether to approve or zero out the $405 million that President Bush is proposing to spend in fiscal year 2008 on the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) — a program aimed at rendering plutonium inert in nuclear weapons but still useful in nuclear power plants.
Nuclear experts at the National Academy of Sciences have long questioned the practicability of the technologies GNEP plans to employ. Currently, the Government Accounting Office is now reviewing the program. This, however, leaves legislators with an information gap as they struggle to decide whether to fully fund the plan, eliminate it altogether, or redirect some of its funding to the many successful energy programs whose budgets President Bush is proposing to gut in FY 2008. In particular, major questions have been raised about the magnitude and costs of radioactive wastes stemming from the GNEP program.
To help legislators and the American public bridge this information gap, the Institute for Policy Studies will release a rigorous study of GNEP on April 23rd. Directed by Robert Alvarez, Senior Policy Advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Energy from 1993 to 1999, the report concludes that the program is likely to squander billions in taxpayer dollars on an unproven reprocessing technology that will generate unprecedented and unmanageable amounts of highly radioactive wastes without plausible disposition paths.
The potentially deadly flaws documented in Alvarez’s study include:
- The amount of long-lived radioactivity disposed of into the environment at a reprocessing site could be thousands of times greater than from nuclear weapons production. Much smaller concentrations of similar wastes at the DOE’s Savannah River Site have been characterized by the National Academy of Sciences as representing “a long term safety concern.”
- GNEP would allow large quantities of cesium 135-a radionuclide with a half life of 2.3 million years-to be disposed in the near surface and pose serious contamination problems for many thousands of years.
- More than four thousand shipments of spent nuclear reactor fuel will be transported on rails and highways through cities and farmlands to the reprocessing site, posing unprecedented emergency response and security challenges.
- Despite DOE’s claims that recycling of reactor spent fuel will solve the nuclear waste disposal problem, a small fraction is likely to be recycled. Uranium constitutes more than 95 percent of the materials in spent nuclear fuel by weight. But, it will require costly treatment for reuse in reactors - estimated in the billions of dollars. As a result, DOE’s plans include the landfill disposal of tens of thousands of tons of recovered uranium.
Alvarez’s study concludes that the Energy Department “lacks a credible plan for management and disposal of radioactive wastes stemming from the GNEP program, particularly regarding waste volumes, site specific impacts, regulatory requirements and life-cycle costs.”
Or as Alvarez has put it more bluntly in conversation, “You can’t just park some of the most highly radioactive wastes in the world at a landfill and assume that by so doing you have kept them safely removed from humans for the next 2.3 million years.”
[tags]GNEP, Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, radiation, nuclear waste, radioactive[/tags]
One Comment
Hal Pawlowski
April 24th, 2007
at 10:21am
Forwarded the article by Robert Alvarez to my daughter who holds a post doc position at Los Alamos Nuclear Labs for comment. FYI she is exploring a career in the nuclear energy field as she feel (as I do) it is the only logical answer to our growing energy needs. Let me copy her comments here as I think them particularly on the mark:
“Dad,
Honestly, I think some of his points have value; however, he is a highly suspect source. His organization is a leftist “think tank,” which, like more leftist groups, will fight against nuclear energy no matter how well-conceived the research and development is. Unfortunately, I feel that GNEP has not been carefully thought out. Nuclear energy has enormous potential but, even 3 years after its conception, GNEP remains somewhat ill-defined in its implementation. I like the ideas behind it, but the necessary scientific research doesn’t seem to have much structure.
He is wrong about recycling being unproven. France is doing it right now. He is wrong about the breeder reactor technology being unproven. They existed before the U.S. nuclear energy program took a major dive after Chernobyl, and they still exist elsewhere in the world. I think GNEP has a lot of potential, but I believe scientists are fighting for GNEP money to fund their pet projects as opposed to selecting a very narrow cross-section of the best ideas and funding only those. I am hoping to get involved enough to help narrow the focus of the scientific research involving the development of Gen. IV reactors and the advanced fuel cycle in the U.S. before the currently substantiated criticisms of the program kill it.
Nuclear energy has enormous potential, and the advanced fuel cycle has the ability to practically eliminate high-level radioactive waste concerns. And this technology could be brought on line within a decade to utilize the used fuel we already have before Yucca even opens. The designs for such advanced burn reactors exist and, with concentrated effort, such reactors could be constructed and become operational relatively quickly. Again, though, GNEP is not very focused. It has the potential to become a financial black hole. Alvarez’s focus on the wastes, however, destroys much of his credibility for me. He is exploiting a “hot button” to frighten people with a concern that isn’t nearly as bad as people fear it is. ALL nuclear wastes are still being stored on site at the plants. Therefore, the volume is not beyond reckoning as he wants people to believe. And 90% or more of the currently existing waste can be recycled once the technology exists. But he just wants to scare people away from GNEP by pounding his fist on the hot button. That is annoying to me.
My hope is that GNEP will focus on the waste problem by developing and implementing the advanced fuel cycle and advanced burner reactor. Once that is done, which, again, could be done relatively quickly if the focus was there, the hot button waste issues would mostly go away. Then nuclear energy becoming a bigger player in electricity generation (beyond its current 20% or so) in the U.S. would be feasible.
Those are some of my thoughts.”