Extra Risk and Cost Associated With French Nuclear Approach

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French-Style Nuclear Reprocessing Will Not Solve U.S. Nuclear Waste Problems
France Uses Less than 1 Percent of the Natural Uranium Resource, Has Higher Waste Volume; Reprocessing Still Requires a Repository and Increases Costs, Proliferation Risks

TAKOMA PARK, Md. - April 8 - Contrary to some prevailing opinion, reprocessing would not eliminate the need for a deep geologic disposal program to replace Yucca Mountain. It aggravates waste, proliferation, and cost problems. The volume of waste to be disposed of in deep geologic repository is increased about six times on a life-cycle basis in the French approach compared to the once-through no-reprocessing approach of the United States.

A new report by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), a nonprofit scientific research group, shows that France uses less than 1 percent of the natural uranium resource, contrary to an impression among some policy makers. The report has several recommendations for President Obama's Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, which was created to address U.S. nuclear waste issues after the administration's cancellation of the Yucca Mountain program.

IEER President Dr. Arjun Makhijani, the author of the report: "In recent years, a 'French fever' has gripped the promoters of nuclear power in the United States. Praise of France's management of spent fuel by reprocessing, including its use of the extracted plutonium as fuel in its nuclear power reactors, is now routinely heard. But it is a fantasy on the scale of the 1950s "too cheap to meter" mythology about nuclear power to imagine that 90 or 95 percent of the "energy value" of U.S. spent fuel can be extracted by reprocessing."

Key IEER report findings include the following:

* On a life-cycle basis, French-style reprocessing and recycle increases the volume of waste that would have to disposed of in a geologic repository. Reprocessing results in high-level radioactive waste and large volumes of Greater than Class C waste, both of which must be managed by deep geologic disposal. Their combined volume on a life-cycle basis is estimated to be about six times more than the no-reprocessing approach that is current U.S. policy, according to Department of Energy estimates. Low-level waste volume and waste transportation shipments are also estimated to increase several-fold.
* France spends about two cents per kilowatt-hour more for electricity generated from reprocessed plutonium compared to that generated from fresh uranium fuel.
* Attempting to combined reprocessing with breeder reactors to convert uranium in U.S. spent fuel in plutonium will create intolerable costs and risks. Reprocessing plus breeder reactors are much more expensive than light water reactors today, which are themselves expensive. Such a system is required to convert most of the uranium in spent fuel into a reactor fuel. Even a single penny in excess generation cost per kilowatt-hour in a breeder reactor-reprocessing system would lead to an added $8 trillion in costs to convert nearly all of the uranium in the 100,000 metric tons of U.S. spent into usable fuel. It would take hundreds of years to accomplish the task and require separation of tens of thousands of bombs equivalent of fissile material each year. The proliferation risks will be far greater than today.
* Adoption of French-style reprocessing program would not eliminate the need for a deep geologic repository. Even complete fissioning of all actinides - an unrealistic proposition - will leave behind large amounts of very long-lived fission and activation products like iodine-129, cesium-135, and chlorine-36 that will pose risks far into the future -- much beyond the 24,100-year half-life of plutonium-239. In fact, France needs a geologic repository and opposition to one has been intense there. The French appear to dislike nuclear waste in their backyards as much as people in the United States.
* Proliferation risks are inherently part of the French (and any other) approach to reprocessing. Even advanced reprocessing technologies will not significantly reduce proliferation risks. For instance a study authored by scientists from DOE laboratories, including Los Alamos and Sandia, concluded that it would take only a few days or a few weeks for proliferant country to make material for nuclear bombs once it had reprocessing plants. It found that new technologies, including electrometallurgical processing, resulted in "only a modest improvement in reducing proliferation risk over existing PUREX technologies and these modest improvements apply primarily for non-state actors." The IEER report concluded that electrometallurgical increases risks in other ways. For instance, it is far less difficult to conceal a plant than the present PUREX technology.

Other key findings include the following:

* Six decades of sodium cooled breeder reactor development has so far resulted in failure. Historical experience indicates no learning curve for the sodium cooled fast breeder reactor, which is the breeder technology that has received the most development. In fact, the two most recent large scale demonstration reactors, Superphénix in France and Monju in Japan, have been failures. Superphénix had a cumulative capacity factor of less than 8 percent before it was shut. Monju has been closed for almost 15 years, following a sodium fire, and has not generated a significant amount of electricity. Sodium cooled breeder reactors are not commercial today despite global expenditures on the order of $100 billion over six decades. They face a host of safety, proliferation and cost hurdles to overcome, some arising from the fact that they use liquid sodium for cooling. They are unlikely to be commercial in the near future. For instance, Japan's estimated date for commercialization of the sodium cooled fast breeder is 2050.
* Storage of liquid high-level wastes creates some risk of catastrophic releases of radioactivity. For instance, the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority has estimated that a severe accident at the liquid waste storage facility in Sellafield, Britain, could result in cesium-137 contamination between 10 percent and 5,000 percent of that created in Norway by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident, which is the worst commercial accident to date, by far. A catastrophic release of radioactivity from a military high-level waste tank occurred in the Soviet Union in 1957.
* Using more than 1 percent of the uranium resource in a light water reactor system is technically impossible even with reprocessing and re-enrichment. In light water reactor systems, almost all the uranium resource winds up as depleted uranium or in spent fuel. Even with repeated reprocessing and re-enrichment, use of the natural uranium resource cannot be increased to more than 1 percent in such a system. A corollary is that the use of 90 to 95 percent of the uranium resource or of the material in the spent fuel is impossible in a light water reactor system even with reprocessing.

These are physical constraints that go with the system and also apply to France's system.

The IEER report also sets out a number of recommendations for the Blue Ribbon Commission on

America's Nuclear Future appointed by Energy Secretary Steven Chu:

* Spent fuel from existing reactors should be slated for direct geologic disposal without reprocessing of any kind; a suitable path for a scientifically sound program should be set forth.
* In the interim, spent fuel should be stored on site as safely as possible - in low density configurations while in pools and in hardened storage when moved to dry casks.
* Breeder reactors and reprocessing are not commercial after six decades of development of sodium cooled breeder reactors, and enormous expenditures. Given the long time frame for commercialization estimated even by some promoters, the proliferation risks, and efforts already made, it does not appear to be a good investment to spend more R&D money in that direction. Rather energy supply R&D resources should be focused on development and deployment of renewable energy technologies and energy efficiency.
* The Commission should request the French company AREVA and/or the French government to supply it with data on the present use of the natural uranium resource purchased for French nuclear reactors, including, specifically, the increases in fission fraction that have actually been achieved by reprocessing and recycling.
* The Commission should also request official data on Greater than Class C waste equivalent expected to be generated on a life-cycle basis in France, and the total volumes and heat generation of packaged waste expected to be disposed of in a deep geologic repository, including estimates of decommissioning waste.
* The Commission should investigate the public support or lack thereof for repository programs in France and Britain, the countries with the longest history of commercial spent fuel reprocessing.
* The Commission should make the same requests regarding the British reprocessing program.
* Official analyses of the mechanisms, probability, and consequences of large accidental releases of radioactivity to the atmosphere from liquid high-level waste storage in tanks should be requested from the French and British governments.

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On March 24, 2010, IEER held a news conference to release documents acquired under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) showing that the outgoing Bush Administration inked 11th-hour agreements with more than a dozen utilities involving 21 proposed nuclear reactors. As IEER noted, between the output of existing commercial nuclear reactors and the 21 proposed nuclear reactors covered by the agreements quietly signed by the outgoing Bush Administration, the U.S. already has agreed to store enough spent (used) reactor fuel to fill the equivalent of not one, but two, Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste repositories. For more information on the March 24th news event, go to http://216.250.243.12/ieer/032410.cfm.

The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research provides policy-makers, journalists, and the public with understandable and accurate scientific and technical information on energy and environmental issues. IEER's aim is to bring scientific excellence to public policy issues in order to promote the democratization of science and a safer, healthier environment.

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Pierre Tristam column

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Published on Thursday, November 19, 2009 by Pierre Tristam.com

Nuclear Power’s Megafraud

by Pierre Tristam

Energy independence is the new creationism; nuclear power its deity. As the head glow for nuclear's new dawn, you can't do better than Aris Candris. He's president and CEO of Westinghouse Electric, the company aiming to build 14 of 25 new nuclear reactors planned in the United States. Candris also sums up everything that's wrong with the nuclear power industry's orchestrated revival-the deceptions, the manipulated numbers, the false promises and the sheer swindle of taxpayer dollars for a technology with a lethal past and an unproven future. Candris' Nov. 9 tribute to nuclear in The Wall Street Journal tells the tall tale.
Candris claims that, because electricity demand will grow 21 percent by 2030 from current levels, and "renewable energy sources produce only a small percentage" of total electricity output, it's "doubtful that they can be scaled up to a degree that would make a significant impact on rising electricity demand over the short or intermediate term." Actually, that's more true of nuclear, far less so of renewable. Not a single nuclear power plant has been approved and built in the United States since the 1970s. The newest one, Watts Bar in Tennessee, began construction in 1973 and went online in 1996 -- a 23-year span that multiplied its initial costs, to $7 billion. Candris gives the impression that a slew of plants are about to be built. Not so. A slew of plants applied for licenses, but only because the federal government is offering up to $1 billion in tax credits per new nuclear plant (once electricity production begins), as long as the application was in by the end of 2008.
"We expect the first of these new plants to come online about 2016," Candris writes of Westinghouse's planned construction, which includes reactors for Progress Energy and Florida Power & Light's Turkey Point plant south of Miami. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission three weeks ago declared Westinghouse's designs flawed and possibly in need of redesign. Westinghouse's Web site still claims its reactors will churn by 2016. Look for pigs flying around Turkey Point, too, because Westinghouse's claims are identical to those of Areva, a French company building what was supposed to be a next-generation nuclear plant in Finland-quick, safe, cheap. The plant, Europe's first in 30 years, was supposed to open last summer. Finns will be lucky if it's open by 2012. It was to cost $3.5 billion. The cost is now creeping close to $7 billion and counting.
Candris presumes that growing electricity demand is "too great to satisfy with energy efficiency and conservation alone." And he points to France, which produces 80 percent of its electricity through nuclear energy, as the model of "the world's most nuclear-dependent and energy-independent country." But French electricity consumption is 7,200 kilowatts per person per year, 44 percent less than the American consumption of 12,900 kilowatts per person. France is a model-of conservation. (Candris is wrong about France's independence: it imports all of its oil and natural gas.)
In the United States between 1995 and 2008, electricity consumption increased by 22 percent, more than the projected increase over the next 21 years. The country coped without gobs of nuclear power-and can cope again as renewables like wind and solar increase their share of electricity generation, from 5 percent today (compared with nuclear's 20 percent) faster and safer. Imagine if renewables had the kind of obscene tax subsidies the nuclear industry is receiving.
Candris' final fallacy: Renewables are "comparatively more expensive energy sources." In fact, nuclear energy is more expensive than solar or wind energy. Take Florida Power & Light's plan to build two new nuclear reactors sometime over the next 12 years (it's not clear when, though the company is already socking it to customers by making them pay for construction today. No other state but Georgia allows that con). The projected cost of the two reactors is $18 billion. It'll certainly go up well beyond that by the time they're done, but go with the $18 billion figure. The two reactors will produce 2,234 megawatts of electricity. That comes out to $8 million per megawatt at the opening bell. FPL just started operating a 25-megawatt solar-power plant in DeSoto County. Cost: $152 million, or $6 million per megawatt -- $2 million cheaper than the projected cost of the nuclear reactors. With wind, it's even cheaper. A Chinese-American consortium on Oct. 29 announced plans for a 600-megawatt wind farm in West Texas. Cost: $1.5 billion, or $2.5 million per megawatt. Cheap nuclear power? Demonstrably not.
Keep in mind that wind and solar farms require zero raw materials to operate, and minimal security. Terrorists aren't about to crash planes into wind turbines or solar panels. Operating a nuclear plant is said to be cheaper than operating gas- or coal-fired plants-but not when security, liability and potential catastrophes are figured into the equation. And for all the safety advances of the past 30 years, the current fleet of about 100 reactors has a projected Chernobyl- or Three Mile Island-like severe accident rate of one every 100 years. Would you like to live near those odds?
The nuclear power industry can't even persuade its own investors to bet on it, so it's going after tax dollars and captive customers to pay for its dreamed-up expansion. Simple solution: If nuclear power can make it on its own, fine. But it's far too dangerous, too uncertain, too costly and too tempting to terrorists to be subsidized by taxpayers and unwilling customers. So far, the nuclear power industry is betting equally and exclusively on public dollars and gullibility. Don't let it get away with it.

© 2009 Pierre Tristam

Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at ptristam@att.net or through his personal Web site at www.pierretristam.com .