ASSESSING THE BENEFITS, COSTS, AND RISKS OF NEAR-TERM REPROCESSING AND ALTERNATIVES

Policies for management of spent nuclear fuel should focus on those options that offer the best combination of low cost, low proliferation risks, low environmental impact, high safety and security, and high sustainability. Traditional PUREX reprocessing technologies are inferior to once-through approaches in most of these respects. Proposed new separations and transmutations approaches such as UREX+ and pyroprocessing are at an early stage of development, and moving quickly toward selecting particular technologies, carrying out engineering-scale demonstrations, and building commercial-scale facilities risks locking in to poor choices, repeating past mistakes. The higher cost of reprocessing and recycling, while small per kilowatt-hour, will amount to an additional tens of billions of dollars in the cost of managing U.S. spent nuclear fuel, which would have to come either from government subsidies lasting many decades (which might not be sustained), a major increase in the nuclear waste fee, or regulations that would effectively force private industry to build and operate uneconomic facilities; all of these options would cast additional doubt on private investments in new nuclear plants in the United States. Dry cask storage provides a safe, proven, low-cost approach to spent fuel management for decades, leaving all options open and making it possible to make better-informed decisions when technology has advanced and economic and political circumstances have evolved. The laudable goals of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership can be achieved without reprocessing and recycling. Indeed, the future of nuclear energy will be best promoted by making nuclear energy as safe, cheap, proliferation-resistant, and uncontroversial as possible, and recycling using the technologies available today or likely to be available in the near term points in the wrong direction on each of those counts.