Despite having spent most of my adult life trying to make electrons move through wires there’s one flavor of power generation of which I know very little. I confess I’ve never really cared for it very much either. Ok, the truth is I’m even more than a little intimidated by it. No, it goes even beyond that. I’m creeped out by it. It’s the electron boogeyman under the bed that could come out in the night and steal your life away; slowly, painfully. But it isn’t some dark childhood fantasy that has clung to me into adult life.  It’s nuclear power.

It’s a fair bet that most of us feel a little quiver in the gut when the we hear “nuclear power” mentioned. The topic itself has been radioactive in America for the better part of the last 30 years.  There was the event at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. Then Chernobyl in Russia. The “what if” of a 9-11 plane augering into a nuke plant in New Jersey instead of the Pentagon. The unavoidable connection to it’s dark side. Oppenheimer, the dark side’s father quoting Hindu scripture at its birth…. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”. Even the lexicon of nuclear finds mothers holding their children closer – proliferation, meltdown, China Syndrome, fallout, arms race, Mutual Assured Destruction, containment, and God forbid…..release.

Nuclear power is the ultimate bi-polar source of electricity. On the one hand, an affordable, reliable, long lived base load energy source with absolutely zero, zip, nada, none, null greenhouse gas emissions, runs day and night at our command, and where nearly 50% of the fuel comes from friendly places like Australia, Canada, Brazil, South Africa and here at home. And notwithstanding that quiver in your gut, it actually has proven itself to be extremely safe. On the other hand, there’s that not so little mind boggling detail of disposing of a waste that will remain lethally radioactive for 10,000 years.

Personally, nuclear waste is what has bothered me the most about nuclear power. There is something breathtakingly wreckless and arrogant about producing a waste product that has to be intimately cared for over 10,000 years before it stops killing you.  Being an engineer I know in my bones that mankind can conceive, build and operate marvelous things through first principles, thoughtful design and sufficient capital. But thinking we can designs a storage facility today based on a 10,000 year useful life specification defies gravity.  Admittedly, I say this fully unencumbered by the facts surrounding the minutiae of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. But contributing editors to Wikipedia have this to say about Yucca mountain:

As of 2008, $9 billion dollars has been spent on the project which makes Yucca Mountain one of the most studied pieces of geology in the world. The Department of Energy (DOE) estimates that it has over 100 million U.S. gallons of highly radioactive waste and 2,800 short tons of spent fuel from the production of nuclear weapons and from research activities in temporary storage^. The cost of the facility is being paid for by a combination of a tax on each kilowatt hour of nuclear power and by the taxpayers for disposal of weapons and Naval nuclear waste . Based on a 2001 cost estimate, approximately 73 percent is funded from consumers of nuclear powered electricity and 27 percent by the tax payers^.

The latest Total System Life Cycle Cost presented to Congress on July 15, 2008 by Director Sproat is $90 billion dollars. This cost, however, can not be compared to previous estimates since it includes a repository capacity about twice as large as previously estimated over a much longer period of time (100 years vs 30 years). Additionally, the cost of the project continues to escalate due to the lack of sufficient funding to most efficiently move forward and complete the project.

The Yucca project is currently being run by a consortium led by Bechtel. Like all things big, dangerous and federal that is managed by an army of scientists and engineers, there are no doubt a multitude of conflicting views and probably several sets of incongruent “facts” that exist simultaneously in their own separate realities. Just to round things out, Obama dislikes the Yucca project and has called for its closure. McCain has been against it before he was for it provided none of it travels through Arizona on the way to the “big hole”.

Which brings me to a point of curious cautious optimism. What if nuclear power didnt’ produce a lethally radioactive waste that had to be managed for 10,000 years?  Say what? Certainly, if that were the case then we’d be all over it and feel a hell of a lot better about building the next generation fleet of nuclear power plants. Right? Not so fast. A little research led me to a website refreshingly short on politics and fervently dedicated to the type of verifiable and repeatable truth that is the realm of the scientist. The website is a forum for physicists called, quite logically, physicsforums.com.

On this forum, a Dr. Gregory Greenman (Physicist) shows up as a frequent contributor to discussions regarding things nuclear.  I have no idea who he is but based on his writings he appears to be a clear thinker and debunker of misinformation related to nuclear matters. Dr. Greenman debunks…….

I’m afraid you are INCORRECT in virtually EVERYTHING you said above.

For example, spent fuel is NOT 96% fissile. Nuclear reactor fuel starts out fresh as about 4% U-235 and 96% U-238; which is probably where you got the 96% number.

After 3 years in the reactor, virtually ALL the fissile U-235 has been burned up. However, some of the fertile” U-238 has been transmuted into Pu-239 which is fissile. Some of that Pu-239 is fissioned in the reactor. In fact, in the 3 years that a fuel assembly spends in a reactor, about 40% of the energy you get from that assembly comes from fissioning Pu-239 that was created in situ. At the end of 3 years, there is still some
Pu-239 left in the fuel; about 2% or so.

So spent fuel consists of about 2% fissile Pu-239, about 4% fission products, and about 94% U-238. So only about 2% of the spent fuel is fissile; NOT 96%.

NO – it DOESN’T make sense for Congress to ban reprocessing because it is costly. Reprocessing IS economical; and that is what the British, the French, and the Japanese do with their fuel cycle. Reprocessing IS economical.

Reprocessing lets you recover the fissile Plutonium so that it can be recycled back to the reactor – so you get more energy out of a given amount of Uranium. Additionally, because the Plutonium is recycled back to the reactor; you don’t have Plutonium in the waste stream. One of the reasons for the high cost of the USA’s spent fuel disposal repository at Yucca Mountain is because it is being built to survive thousands of years;
which is the lifetime of the Plutonium that will be entombed there.

If you get the Plutonium out of the waste stream, and recycle it back to the reactor to be burned; then the repository doesn’t have to survive for thousands of years. That’s because the longest lived fission product of any consequence is Cesium-137 which has a half-life of 30 years compared to the 24,000 year half life of Plutonium-239.

In a time span much, much less than that required to store Plutonium, ALL the radioisotopes in the nuclear waste will have decayed to a level of radioactivity LESS than the Uranium that was mined from the ground. If you aren’t concerned about the Uranium in the ground naturally, and its level of radioactivity; then you shouldn’t be concerned with fission products that are several hundered years old either.

Reprocessing is an EXCELLENT, and COST EFFECTIVE technology; and the USA would use it just like the other countries, Britain, France, Japan,…. but Congress made reprocessing ILLEGAL in the USA.

Dr. Greenman goes on to say……

WRONG AGAIN!!!!

The legislation that PROHIBITS reprocessing and recycling of spent nuclear fuel in the USA is almost 30 years old.

The Republicans were NOT in power when this legislation was passed.

The law that prohibits reprocessing and recycling of spent nuclear fuel in the USA was passed by a Congress controlled by the Democrats, and with a Democratic President in the White House; namely President Jimmy Carter.

NO WAY can the prohibition on reprocessing / recycling of spent nuclear fuel in the USA be laid at the feet of the Republicans!!

The legislation was passed by Democrats at the behest of the anti-nukes; and their hews and cries that nuclear power was horrible and that it was causing cancer and was going to kill us all.

President Carter wanted the United Kingdom and France to stop reprocessing, since he felt that reprocessing of nuclear fuel would encourage nuclear proliferation. So President Carter decided that the USA should “lead by example”; and that if the USA decided to forego reprocessing, that the United Kingdom and France would
naturally follow the lead of the USA. The United Kingdom and France aren’t lemmings that do whatever the USA does; and they pursued policies that are in their own interest.

That legislation has stood for nearly 30 years. Few politicians have had the courage to revisit it. At one point, President Ronald Reagan suggested a change, and that went nowhere. Politicians of neither Party have seen fit to revisit this issue and change it.

The current President Bush has suggested that this be changed, and the Dept of Energy is starting to look at the issue. You can see the response from the anti-nukes as shown in the links to “Union of Concerned Pseudo-Scientists” and Public Citizen that I cited in my previous post.

They are girding for a new battle with the current Administration over plans to revisit reprocessing and recycling technology as part of the GNEP – the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.

Is that for real? Nuclear power plants without 10,000 year lethal waste? No need for Yucca mountain? Also,  Dr. Greenman didn’t mention that by recycling/reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, the remaining world supply of fissionable uranium goes from 50-70 years to several hundred years. Interesting, no?

What is clear from this is that our future energy policy debate and policy making has to put all options on the table including the recycling of spent nuclear fuel. Anti-nuclear hysteria has to be tempered with bi-partisan pragmatism and an eye towards realistically achievable energy security. As importantly, rational fact-based scientific input has to be given a real place at the policy table while dogmatic ideology of both stripes is shown the door. It’s also about time we get a few grownups in Washington who can stand up and say to the nation that we can do some things just like those Europeans and Asians without losing our souls or national identity!

Tags: energy independence, energy policy, nuclear, power generation