The Senate’s longtime champion of nuclear energy said today that other communities, not just Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, should be considered for storing the nation’s nuclear waste.We'll see where this goes.New Mexico Republican Sen. Pete Domenici’s comments this morning reflect Washington’s deep frustration over the Department of Energy’s endless delays at Yucca Mountain. The nuclear industry has quietly been soliciting other communities as potential hosts for a repository, and Domenici said he would introduce legislation that would free up money from the Yucca Mountain account to do just that. Doing so would represent a major policy shift on Yucca. The multi-billion-dollar Yucca fund is considered sacred, having been built from fees collected from ratepayers in states with nuclear energy.
...Domenici’s comments came as both Senate and House appropriators this week are considering Energy’s budget requests for the coming year. The department promises to meet its summer deadline for submitting the long-awaited license for the waste dump at Yucca.
In his comments, Domenici said he no longer believes focusing solely on a permanent repository in Nevada is the way to go, fearing the Yucca only strategy that does not include efforts to recycle waste is “deeply flawed.” “I believe this path will prove to be the highest cost solution and it fails to take advantage of recycling,” Domenici said. “We should pursue a comprehensive waste strategy led by an approach to recycle spent nuclear fuel with the remaining waste to be put in either Yucca Mountain or another suitable site such as deep salt formations,” such as a site in New Mexico that now stores less toxic waste.
Is the nation beginning to head a new direction on how to manage its used nuclear fuel? Here's the direction Senator Domenici thinks we should go:
Comments
Glad to see one of the most enlightened of our political class saying as much in public.
Joe Somsel
In such a case I think chloride reactors would beat the pants off of solid-fueled sodium-cooled reactors.
My modest proposal:
1. Shut down Yucca and devote the funding in the waste fund to the development of liquid-chloride and liquid-fluoride reactors. Chloride reactors would be used to destroy transuranics and breed U233 from thorium. Fluoride reactors would start with U233 and thereafter consume only thorium without producing transuranics.
2. Fluorinate spent nuclear fuel currently in storage. Remove uranium through further fluorination (from UF4 to UF6) and either send it for re-enrichment or convert it to UO2 for low-level disposal. Remove transuranics from the fluoride mixture by reduction with aluminum metal, which was recently demonstrated by French research to effectively separate TRU-fluorides from fission product fluorides.
3. Send fission product fluorides to a monitored storage site for ~300 years until they decay to background levels of radiation.
4. Convert metallic TRUs (obtained by reduction) to TRU-chlorides and destroy them through fission in a chloride reactor. Chloride reactors are capable of very hard spectrums and have inherent safety features not found in solid-core fast reactors.
5. Breed U233 from thorium during the destruction of TRUs in the chloride reactor and use them to start thermal-spectrum, fluoride reactors that use thorium as an essentially unlimited energy supply.
Such a scheme would destroy long-lived waste while transitioning to a fuel source (thorium) that does not produce the transuranics in the first place.
I view the nuclear 'waste' as fuel to be used in the future.
The projected FINAL cost of Yucca Mountain has been steadily escalating over the years. the last OFFICIAL estimate was, what - $60 billion ? with no end in sight.
Call the final dollar amount what you will, but a reasonable conclusion is that recycle infrastructure will not cost more and is very likely to cost significantly less than Yucca Mountain.
Kirk,
The prime requirement for an actinide burner is a hard neutron spectrum. There are many ways to achieve that but liquid metal designs have the most operating experience and technical development. It does not appear that one needs a big reactor to deal with the actinides either. I've seen estimates of 5 to 60 MWth (from memory) and the thermal conditions need not be a stretch for generation efficiency and economics of power generation.
I'm neutral on the actual reactor design but I'd prefer the lowest technical risk. DoE, the Japanese, and others are funding R&D on optimal cycles so the issue is still open.
Joe Somsel
Agreed Joe, and you won't find a much harder spectrum (at least in a critical reactor) than a chloride reactor.
There are many ways to achieve that but liquid metal designs have the most operating experience and technical development.
Yes, and that experience has taught us many things. Sodium is still violently reactive with air and water and doesn't operate hot enough to go to an efficient gas turbine cycle. Fuel fabrication is difficult and isotopic inventories are always uncertain. And most troubling of all, it is very difficult to build sodium-cooled fast reactors with decent negative temperature coefficients without "softening" the spectrum considerably, which compromises the destruction of transuranics.
Sodium-cooled fast breeders are a dead-end and should be abandoned. The chloride reactor is the way to go for transuranic destruction.
Both Japan and France have tried commercial ventures with sodium coolant and failed.
The only molten salt work I'm aware of is from 60 years ago in relation to nuclear aircraft. I see a lot of potential that hasn't been hashed out enough to determine it's commercial merit.
Your knowledge is incorrect. New Mexicans fought tooth and nail against WIPP.
Now comes Sen. Domenici, who is convinced "spent" fuel is really an asset that should be reprocessed, using in some way the same Fund.
Senators: please level with us that the $21 billion supposedly in the Fund has already been spent on unrelated government "needs." Also please tell your colleagues they won't have access to the roughly $500 million "surplus" fee revenue they habitually divert to other activities each year.
Meanwhile, the nuclear utilities do the responsible thing of carefully storing the spent fuel on-site, despite the government contracts they hold that say the government will remove it.
On costs, what really matters is the amount the electricity consumer must pay to fully fund the ultimate disposition of spent fuel. Right now for direct disposal at Yucca Mountain this cost is 0.1 cents per kilowatt hour. Current reprocessing technology would be much more expensive, most likely requiring that the fee be increased to 0.3 to 0.5 cents per kilowatt hour. The best thing to do is to take the time needed to improve the economics and effectiveness of recycle technologies, and implement them when it makes economic sense to do so.