Outlining his positions on energy last week, Secretary -designate
Steven Chu listed three technologies that “would be nice to have,
but are not ready for use, either because they are too expensive
to be practical, or not demonstrated to be safe.”
They were: 1) sequestering the carbon dioxide from power plants;
2) making ethanol from cellulose; and 3) recycling nuclear fuel
to reduce its volume and recover unused fuel.
Well, he’s right about the carbon sequestering and cellulose. And
two out of three ain’t bad.
Carbon sequestering may never be ready for prime time. Robert
Socolow, head of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton,
has calculated that it would take “an oil field six times the
size of the smallest of what the industry calls ‘giant fields,’
of which some 500 exist,” to accommodate the average
coal plant.
Moreover, carbon dioxide is not a friendly substance. At 15
percent of the atmosphere it is lethal. Underground repositories
would have to be stored at high pressure and an accidental escape
would be disastrous. CO2 is heavier than air and would settle on
the earth’s surface, possibly killing thousands. No one has even
thought of the insurance aspects yet.
Ethanol made from cellulose — the woody and non-edible portions
of a plant — is one of those futuristic technologies that keep
receding over the horizon. Bacteria are required to break
cellulose into sugars that can be fermented. Those bacteria
thrive in the stomachs of cows and termites but have never been
cultivated on an industrial scale. Numerous experimenters are
trying, but no one is even sure that it can be done.
But how does nuclear reprocessing make the list? If nuclear
recycling is “too expensive to be practical” and “not proven to
be safe,” then Steven Chu must be the present King of France.
The French have been reprocessing nuclear fuel since the 1970s —
about the time we gave it up. The French now recycle all the
spent fuel from their 65 reactors — which provides them with 75
percent of their electricity. They do it so well they are also
recycling for other countries. They are even buying enriched
uranium from old Soviet weapons stocks, “blending it down” with
uranium mine tailings (another “waste” product) and selling it to
us as reactor fuel. Although few people seem to realize it, one
out of every ten light bulbs in America is now powered by a
former Soviet weapon.
By the time the French are finished reprocessing, they have
nothing of what we would call “nuclear waste.” A small amount of
highly radioactive material remains. It could be processed into
industrial and medical isotopes, but it does not make economic
sense right now. So the French put it into storage. All their
“nuclear waste” from thirty years of producing 75 percent of
their electricity is kept beneath the floor of one large room at
Le Havre.
How did the French get so far ahead of us? In the 1970s they
realized they had no other choice. “We don’t have oil but we have
ideas,” was the slogan with which they sold the public. (Our
implicit slogan, by contrast, was “We don’t have ideas but we
have plenty of coal.”) Once you commit to nuclear, reprocessing
makes perfect sense. After the first “burn,” almost half the
potential energy in a fuel rod still remains. “One-third of our
electric power now comes from recycled fuel rods,” says Jacques
Besnainou, head of Areva’s American operations. “We call spent
fuel ‘the new uranium mines.’”
Besides yielding more energy, spent fuel is also a source of
valuable medical and industrial isotopes. Forty percent of all
medical procedures now use radioactive tracers and it’s a $10
billion business — except we import 100 percent of our medical
isotopes from Canada. All our material is headed for Yucca
Mountain.
In one respect, however, Chu is correct. It is probably too late
and too expensive to initiate our own reprocessing effort here.
France is far ahead of us and it will be much cheaper to import
the technology. Areva, the French nuclear company, is already
building a $2 billion uranium enrichment plant in Idaho Falls and
a $350 million manufacturing facility for nuclear components in
partnership with Northrop Grumman at Newport News. It is also
reviving the Barnwell, South Carolina facility — originally
abandoned by the Carter Administration — that will turn surplus
plutonium from the weapons program into “mixed oxide” fuel that
can power nuclear reactors.
Yes, Mr. Secretary-designate, nuclear reprocessing is alive and
well. It just isn’t an American technology anymore. But that’s
what comes from being phobic about all things nuclear.
