Science Policy
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Report Urges DOE’s Spent Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Program to Be Scaled Back The research and development component of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), a program that aims to reprocess spent nuclear fuel, which could then be shared with partner countries, should not go forward at its current pace, said a new report from the National Research Council. DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, of which GNEP is a part, should instead assign the highest priority to facilitating the startup of new commercial nuclear power plants, a program that is currently falling behind schedule due to funding gaps. Amid renewed interest in nuclear power, the Office of Nuclear Energy’s budget has grown nearly 70% since 2003. In light of this growth, the administration’s 2006 budget requested that funds be set aside for the Research Council to review and prioritize all of the office’s programs, which besides reprocessing and new plant assistance, include development of new types of nuclear reactors, the use of nuclear energy to create hydrogen, and the upgrade of facilities at the Idaho National Laboratory. The purpose of reprocessing spent nuclear fuels is to remove materials from the radioactive waste that can be recycled for use at another plant. In the past, the United States has resisted reprocessing because the methods available at the time created a plutonium byproduct that would have increased the risk of nuclear proliferation. But in recent years, the federal government began to reconsider reprocessing as new technologies emerged that could recycle the spent nuclear fuel without separating plutonium. This process is a main technical goal of GNEP; the committee that wrote the report did not review or comment on the international aspects of the partnership. However, the technologies required for achieving GNEP’s goals are too early in development to justify DOE’s accelerated schedule for construction of commercial facilities that would use these technologies, the report said. DOE said that the program will save time and money if pursued on the commercial scale, but the committee believes that the opposite will likely be true and found no economic justification. Although a stated goal of the program is to reduce the overall amount of radioactive waste, which would in turn decrease the need for a second geological repository in addition to Yucca Mountain, it was not clear to the committee that such a need currently exists. Moreover, there has been insufficient peer review of the program.
While all 17 members of the committee concluded that the GNEP R&D program, as currently planned, should not be pursued, 15 of the members said that the less-aggressive reprocessing research program that preceded the current one should be. However, if DOE returns to the earlier program, called the Advance Fuel Cycle Initiative (AFCI), it should not commit to a major demonstration or deployment of reprocessing unless there is a clear economic, national security, or environmental reason to do so. Two committee members
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