We love it when the tech news we watch sparks healthy debate! In this case, Robert Alvarez, author of the report cited here, responds to yesterday’s feedback:

I appreciated the comments of Hal Pawloksi’s daughter, who works at the DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. However, I’m not sure she has read my actual report, versus the news release about it. Here is the URL for the report (PDF).

With respect to her claims about rapid deployment of nuclear spent fuel recycling and actinide transmutation, I draw your attention to a 1996 report by the National Research Council (NRC) done at the request of the DOE regarding major elements, which now make up the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (reprocessing, transmutation, waste management/disposal etc). The NRC concluded that if full-scale reprocessing and transmutation were successful it would cost $500 billion and take 150 years to accomplish. Perhaps she might want to share the technical and cost basis for her commentary that appears to contradict the National Academy of Sciences.

The United States walked away from reprocessing and breeder reactors by the early 1980s because of proliferation, cost, and technological concerns. France has continued to reprocess and its breeder program effectively halted a few years ago for cost and technological reasons. Of the world-wide plutonium stocks resulting from reprocessing of power reactor fuel, about one third has been used for reactor fuel. The remaining 200 metric tons sits at the reprocessing sites and is enough to fuel some 30,000 nuclear weapons.

Regardless of our disagreement about the significance of radioactive wastes in public debate, DOE’s troubled experience with radiochemical treatment of past reprocessing wastes should serve as a cautionary warning. With a liability in excess of $100 billion, and after 25 years, DOE has treated less than one percent of the radioactivity in defense high-level wastes for geological disposal.

Even though magnitude of radioactivity in wastes generated by the GNEP program would be unprecedented, DOE has yet to provide a credible plan for the safe management and disposal of these wastes. This plan should address waste volumes, disposition paths, site-specific impacts, regulatory requirements and life-cycle costs. Given past failures to address significant waste problems before they were created (Los Alamos is no exception), DOE’s rush to invest major public funds for deployment should be suspended.

Before we spend taxpayer dollars, doesn’t the public deserve to know whether or not GNEP is a downpayment on yet another large radioactive waste “balloon mortgage?”

[tags]gnep, nuclear power, nuclear energy, nuke[/tags]