Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
G. W. Bush announced a change in policy and initiated
what is called the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership
(GNEP). The purpose of GNEP is to develop a partner-
ship of interested nations to advance the technology for
continuous reprocessing and recycling the TRU in new
fast-spectrum reactors that can in principle burn as fuel all
the plutonium as well as the other long-lived minor actin-
ides. When this is all worked out, the only materials that
would go to a repository are
fission fragments and a
small amount of long-lived material that leaks into the
fission-fragment waste stream in the separation process,
which is not
% perfect. The required isolation time
would be roughly a few thousand years, a time for which
isolation can be assured with very high con
dence
(remember the pyramids). It will take about
years to
develop and test the technology.
We can temporize and continue to push the solution to
the problem to later and later. All of the US operating
nuclear plants have enough room to store on site all the
spent fuel they will produce over their full lifetimes.
I believe that this is also true for all or nearly all of the
world
s reactors.
Just as I do not like leaving the global warming
problem to my grandchildren, I do not like leaving the
nuclear waste problem to them either. It is solvable for
either the once-through cycle or the separation-and-
treatment cycle. My advice to our government is to
store the spent fuel either at Yucca Mountain or at some
other government site, or even at the reactors. Develop
the technology for destroying the long-lived components
in a new generation of reactors and if it all works
out, go down the reprocessing and treatment route and
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