Nuclear
Information and Resource Service
27 years
of expertise on the nuclear fuel chain.
Contact:
Linda Gunter, director of media relations
202.328.0002
Note to reporters: President Bush is expected to address – and
advocate for – nuclear power in his State of the Union speech tonight.
Although he may make only passing reference to his plans to revive the
reprocessing of commercial waste fuel, this program is central to the Bush
administration’s efforts to jump-start the moribund nuclear power
industry. We offer the following statement for citation and quotation on this
issue. We also include beneath the statement a short backgrounder on
reprocessing. Our spokespeople are available for further comment by calling:
202.328.0002
Statement
of Mary Olson, NIRS Campaign to Stop Reprocessing. Director of NIRS southeast
office.
“President Bush’s misguided obsession with nuclear power
has reached a critical and dangerous juncture. The administration has been desperate
to find a nuclear waste solution in order to resuscitate the moribund and
unpopular nuclear power industry by moving forward quickly on the scientifically-flawed
Yucca Mountain waste dump in Nevada. Instead it has found itself spinning its
wheels in the mire of
“Its latest scheme is reprocessing of irradiated commercial fuel,
one of the dirtiest and most proliferation-vulnerable processes in the nuclear
fuel chain. Abandoned in this country for more than 30 years, countries where
it has been done – including
“The price tag in dollars – as well as in health impacts
– will be enormous if this country is allowed to venture back down the
reprocessing road. The only
“The existing nuclear reactors around the globe are already sitting-duck terrorist targets. Separating plutonium from nuclear power waste fuel – as reprocessing does – simply sets up new and inviting opportunities for terrorists to seize fissile, bomb-capable materials. Support for a reprocessing program makes a mockery of statements coming out of this administration that protecting the American people from terrorism is paramount. Instead, it will put more Americans in harm’s way.”
Reprocessing
Is Not the
“Solution” to the Nuclear Waste Problem
The Radioactive Waste Burden
Splitting atoms to make electricity has created an enormous problem:
waste containing 95% of the toxic radioactivity produced during the Atomic Age.
Nuclear weapons production, industrial activity, research and medicine
combined, create only 5% of this problem.
Every nuclear power reactor annually generates 20-30 tons of high-level
nuclear waste since the irradiated fuel itself is the waste when removed from
the reactor core. Like
fuel, the waste is a solid ceramic pellet, stacked inside a thin metal tube or
‘cladding.’ In addition to residual uranium, the waste is about 1%
plutonium that is formed inside the fuel rods by the reactor. The waste also
contains about 5% highly radioactive fission products like cesium, strontium
and iodine, making it millions of times more radioactive than
“fresh” uranium fuel. Unshielded, it delivers a lethal dose in
seconds and will remain a hazard for at least 12,000 human generations.
No End in Site
High-level waste is piling up at reactor sites, stored outside of
containment in pools, and in large dry containers called casks. A growing
security threat, storage has been repeatedly approved to enable continued
reactor operation, and therefore continued nuclear waste production, making
risks greater. Now new reactors are being proposed, even though there is no
credible solution for the approximately 120,000 tons of waste the first
generation of reactors will produce.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has devoted nearly 20 years to the
development of a high-level dump at
Disregarding Hard-Won Wisdom
The Bush / Cheney administration and its congressional allies are
intent on reversing over 30 years of extraordinarily rare common sense in
nuclear policy. In the 1970s it was decided that irradiated fuel and the
plutonium it contains, should be treated as waste–not as a resource. This was
in part due to the catastrophic failure after only one year of operations at
Every reprocessing site (
At the end of 2005, Congress awarded $50 million to the U.S. Department
of Energy with instructions to make a new waste-reprocessing plan. DOE is
directed to use one of its sites–in 2006 it instructed to hold a
“competition” and the “winner,” to be announced in
2007, will get the new reprocessing site. Congress specified (another promise?)
that the site should be opened by 2010.
Reprocessing Destabilizes Waste --
The fuel rods are taken out of the
assemblies, chopped up and then dissolved in nitric acid. The resulting highly
radioactive and caustic stew is then processed to remove the plutonium and the
uranium, leaving the highly radioactive fission products in the liquid. While
there are methods to attempt to re-stabilize this material, there has been a
fundamental loss in the stability of the dry ceramic pellet in the metal clad
fuel rod.
Completely False Claims
1. Reprocessing is NOT
recycling. The
formation of fission products in the fuel rods makes high-level waste
fundamentally different from the uranium it came from. It is not possible to
remake the original fuel again from high-level waste – thus it is not a
cycle.
2. Reprocessing does not
reduce radioactivity. No credible expert says reprocessing reduces total radioactivity; some
less informed sources imply this. Reprocessing does change not the amount of
radioactivity – except to smear it around a large surface area, thereby
diluting it without any actual reduction of radioactivity.
3. Reprocessing does not reduce waste
volume; to the contrary, fuel pellet volume is magnified by a factor of
100–100,000. The resulting “dilution” allows the reclassification
from “high-level,” to the so-called “low-level” waste
category, which is still deadly.
The “Midas-Touch” in Reverse
The King Midas story of childhood
teaches about the hazard of greed. Radioactive waste contaminates everything it
comes in contact with--but instead of turning it all to gold, everything it
comes in contact with is turned to expensive, dangerous radioactive waste!
Kicking the
Can…
A stated goal of reprocessing is to
use plutonium for reactor fuel. The most common form is MOX (short for
‘mixed oxide’), made from plutonium and uranium 238 (depleted
uranium). While
today’s reactors can use MOX fuel, it is both riskier and more hazardous: MOX is harder to control, and twice
as deadly as uranium fuel if control is lost. MOX does not “solve”
the waste problem since reprocessing MOX fuel is even harder than reprocessing
uranium fuel, and not widely done.
Plutonium Destabilizes Our World
High-level nuclear waste contains so much lethal radioactivity that the
plutonium inside the waste fuel rods is effectively safeguarded. Separating out
the plutonium makes it available for weapons use. For the United States to reverse
more than 30 years of policy against recovering civil plutonium also reverses
the moral authority with which the U.S. calls on other nations to refrain from
this activity.
Far from putting the atomic genie
back in the bottle, reprocessing creates millions of gallons of highly
radioactive, caustic, destabilized high-level waste that history shows will
leak; be evaporated; residues put into glass that may, or may not retain the
radioactivity for even a generation; and now, under a new policy, be left
forevermore on the reprocessing site, mixed only with grout in a thin effort to
keep it from contaminating soil, water, food and our bodies. This is NO SOLUTION.
--Mary Olson,
January 2006
Nuclear Information and Resource
Service
202-328-0002
NIRS Southeast Office
828-675-1792 nirs@main.nc.us