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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.

DOE officials in recent years have resisted congressional pressure to move spent fuel stockpiled at U.S. reactors to regional storage facilities, saying the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) bars them from taking title to the fuel until the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada is granted a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license.

Now, sources say, the department is planning to ask Congress to amend the NWPA to remove that limitation as part of its fiscal 2009 budget request to Congress, which the DOE is in the early stages of preparing.

However, the department’s goal is apparently to transport it for reprocessing, most likely at La Hague in France, not to move the spent fuel to regional storage facilities in the U.S., as some lawmakers have requested. It is unclear whether the DOE intends to ask for authority to take title only to fuel from closed plants, or to spent fuel stockpiled at operating U.S. reactors as well.

Megan Barnett, a DOE spokeswoman, would neither confirm nor deny that the department was considering the recycling plan, but noted that it was pursuing recycling options through its Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) initiative. The DOE is in the early stages of budget preparation and plans can change, she said.

“As partners with 16 nations in the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, we continue to review and develop any number of options to expand nuclear power worldwide and advance GNEP principles,” said Barnett. Reprocessing, or “recycling” as the Bush administration now calls it, is central to GNEP, its marquee international nuclear power and nonproliferation program.

The reprocessing plan would appear to have several goals, including satisfying lawmakers who want fuel removed from the handful of decommissioned or decommissioning plants in the U.S.

In language accompanying the DOE’s fiscal 2008 spending bill, House appropriators directed the department to develop a plan to “take custody” of the waste at closed plants, although the appropriators wanted the DOE to consolidate it at one or more interim storage sites and did not mention reprocessing it.

In addition to trying to satisfy congressional demands, the DOE also appears motivated by a desire to revive U.S. support for reprocessing, which President Carter barred in 1977 over nuclear nonproliferation concerns.

In addition to reviving reprocessing in the U.S., GNEP is designed to spread the use of nuclear power into new countries by having nations with well-developed nuclear programs—such as the U.S., Japan, and France—offer sensitive fuel services to countries that want to start nuclear power programs.

Fuel manufacturing, enrichment, and recycling can separate plutonium or uranium for possible diversion to weapons programs, and GNEP is designed to allow new countries to build nuclear industries without a need to pursue those processes. The DOE also says that new reprocessing technologies are significantly more proliferation-resistant than those used in the Carter era.

Despite prioritizing the program highly, the Bush administration has found mixed support for GNEP from Congress, where some lawmakers fear the DOE is moving too fast at the expense of other nuclear programs.

One source said the DOE may be hoping that reprocessing spent fuel from U.S. closed plants, even if done in France, would demonstrate that reprocessing is a workable, viable option and thus create more support for GNEP.