MANAGING SPENT FUEL IN THE UNITED STATES: THE ILLOGIC OF REPROCESSING

The Bush Administration has proposed that U.S. spent power-reactor fuel be reprocessed instead of being sent directly to a deep underground repository. It argues that proliferation risks would be reduced if, under a Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, non-weapon states sent their spent fuel to nuclear-weapon states or Japan to be reprocessed with the reprocessing states recycling the separated transuranics in their own reactors and keeping the residual radioactive waste. Implementing this proposal would be more costly than operating light-water reactors on a oncethrough fuel cycle, however. It is also premature, given the difficulties that are being encountered in disposing of 250 tons of already-separated civilian plutonium and more than 100 tons of excess weapons plutonium. Finally, France, Russia and the UK have all found that it is politically impossible to keep reprocessing waste from other countries and countries exporting their spent fuel for reprocessing have decided that it is not worth the cost if they are not thereby freed of their radioactive-waste problems. As a result, virtually all countries that made reprocessing contracts with the French, Russian and the UK reprocessing establishments have not renewed them.