Multinational Spent Fuel Disposal: Nonproliferation Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract: In recent years, we have seen encouraging progress toward siting national nuclear waste repositories. Sweden and Finland have demonstrated workable solutions and selected sites based on overwhelming local support. France, Canada and the UK also have functioning waste management programs at various levels of maturity. For all five, building the requisite public trust has required decades, often after early missteps. However, most countries—including the United States—continue to struggle to permanently dispose of waste produced by nuclear power programs. This is both a waste management issue and a proliferation and security concern as the “back end” decisions that countries make can involve the use of sensitive nuclear technologies such as plutonium separation. While there is currently no back end “market,” enormous opportunities exist for eventual solutions that can enhance safety, proliferation and security goals by leveraging the provision of a spent fuel disposal pathway in return for a commitment not to pursue sensitive fuel capabilities such as enrichment and reprocessing. Fuel assurances are far less valued because the fuel supply market already functions efficiently. There are complicating factors beyond the significant challenges that beset purely national programs. However, we are not without prospects, and one or two successes with multinational cooperation may result in rather rapid and even profound changes. This paper will pay particular attention will paid to developments in Europe – smaller countries have already made important political progress toward this end through organizations such as the European Repository Development Organisation and the European Commission – and how we might apply these lessons to other regions: in particular, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, which operate large nuclear power programs, have immediate spent fuel storage issues and have proved unable to implement permanent national solutions; and countries/regions with nascent programs or considering nuclear power for the first time, such as Asia and the Middle East, as it is amongst these newcomers that leveraging is likely to be the most effective. This paper will draw from the “NTI-CSIS New Approaches to the Nuclear Fuel Cycle” expert group deliberations and recommendations from the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future.