DOE Continues Nuclear Push

Last week, the Department of Energy quickened the pace of its plan to develop technologies and facilities to reprocess spent nuclear fuel in the U.S. It announced $20 million in aid to public and commercial groups to conduct siting studies needed to build plants that would be part of a system to reuse spent nuclear fuel.

The announcement is part of the Bush Administration's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, a $250 million proposal to expand U.S. use of nuclear power and for the first time to overcome a 1970s presidential ban on reprocessing spent nuclear fuel in the U.S.

Specifically, DOE is interested in supporting construction of two types of commercial-scale facilities: a "consolidated fuel treatment center" to separate used nuclear fuel into waste and reusable products and an "advanced burner reactor" to generate electricity while transmuting long-lived transuranic elements into shorter lived fission products.

The plan offers up to $5 million in support for a single-site study. DOE is particularly interested in sites in geographical areas that have community and state support, says Dennis Spurgeon, DOE assistant secretary for nuclear energy, who made the announcement.

The department is on a fast track; it wants the proposals within one month and will announce its funding decision by October 2006. It is also seeking guidance and an expression of interest from U.S. and international companies on the potential to use these advanced technologies in the U.S.

Meanwhile, nuclear power, radioactive waste, and fuel reprocessing were also discussed at a recent Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee hearing. The subject was S. 2587, a bill written by the Bush Administration to speed up and ease permitting by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of the long-delayed Yucca Mountain underground repository in Nevada. The bill would also strike the 70,000-metric-ton cap on waste storage at the site.

Even with the bill's passage, however, reprocessing, interim nuclear waste storage, and the repository would be needed for nuclear energy to expand, noted committee chairman and nuclear energy proponent Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), who introduced the Administration's bill.

Domenici called the Yucca Mountain schedule a "slippery thing" and predicted that, even under the Administration's latest revised timeline, it would take until 2040 to get the tonnage of nuclear waste generated to date shipped to Yucca Mountain. He calculated that the repository's capacity would be fully allocated seven years before it is scheduled to open in 2017.

Consequently, Domenici joined DOE, the nuclear industry, and other nuclear advocates at the hearing in pressing for reprocessing as a means to potentially reduce the amount of waste headed to the Nevada repository.