RE-PROCESSING

Information regarding plans for re-processing nuclear waste in the US and regarding existing re-processing plants across the globe

Panel Limits Nuclear Reprocessing Funds

A proposal for the United States to resume reprocessing nuclear fuel ran into trouble Thursday in Congress, undermining President Bush's plans to revamp how the nuclear industry deals with its waste.

Recycling nuclear waste too dangerous

As a senior energy adviser in the Clinton administration, I recall attending a briefing by the National Academy of Sciences in 1996 on the feasibility of recycling nuclear fuel. I'd been intrigued by the idea because of its promise to reduce the amount of wastes that had to be buried, where it could conceivably seep into drinking water at some point in its multimillion-year-long half-lives. But then came the Academy's unequivocal conclusion: The idea was supremely impractical. It would cost up to $500 billion in 1996 dollars and take 150 years to accomplish the transmutation of dangerous long-lived radioactive toxins.

Radioactive Wastes and the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) is being promoted as a program to bring about the expansion of world-wide nuclear energy. To meet this goal DOE proposes to significantly reduce the amount of highlevel radioactive waste for geological disposal and to reduce proliferation risks by transmuting fissionable materials into less troublesome isotopes. Crucial to the GNEP plan is using a new, unproven type of chemical reprocessing of spent fuel from power reactors in the United States and possibly other nations. Unlike direct disposal of spent nuclear fuel rods, reprocessing involves chemical separation of radioisotopes and creates multiple waste streams. It also releases large volumes of radioactivity into the environment, typically by factors of several thousand compared with nuclear reactors. DOE claims that the new reprocessing technology under development will not pose these problems.

DOE pushing to recycle closed plants’ spent fuel

The Energy Department is planning to ask Congress in next year’s budget request for authority to take title to spent nuclear fuel stockpiled at closed U.S. nuclear plants and to reprocess it, most likely in France.

Nuclear Fuel Recycling: More Trouble Than It's Worth

Plans are afoot to reuse spent reactor fuel in the U.S. But the advantages of the scheme pale in comparison with its dangers

Water cooling at Sellafield

 

Water Cooling at Sellafield II

 

Video: “Dr. Frank von Hippel discusses nuclear fuel reprocessing with Ben Moore of the Coastal Conservation League” (South Carolina)

On May 29, Dr. Frank von Hippel of Princeton University gave two talks on reprocessing (Global Nuclear Energy Partnership) at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC. His evening talk to around 100 people kicked off a national nuclear waste summit that activists around the US attended.

Nuclear Recycling Fails the Test

Over the past few years, attention to the recycling of nuclear power spent fuel has grown. Fears of global warming due to fossil fuel burning have given nuclear energy a boost; over the next 15 years dozens of new power reactors are planned world-wide. To promote nuclear energy, the Bush administration is seeking to establish international spent nuclear fuel recycling centers that are supposed to reduce wastes, recycle uranium, and convert nuclear explosive materials, such as plutonium to less troublesome elements in advanced power reactors.