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January 13, 2006
COMMUNITY VIEWPOINT 'Smart' use of nuclear waste
Dear Elected Representatives: The following quotes are from an article, "Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste," by William H. Hannum, Gerald E. Marsh and George S. Stanford in the December 2005 issue of Scientific American. The authors are physicists who worked on fast-reactor development before retiring from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne Laboratory. "In any nuclear power plant, heavy metal atoms are consumed as the fuel 'burns' ... When technicians remove the depleted fuel, only about one twentieth of the potentially fissionable atoms in it have been used up, so the so-called spent fuel still contains about 95 percent of its original energy. In addition, only about one-tenth of the mined uranium ore is converted into fuel in the enrichment process so less than a hundredth of the ore's total energy is used to generate power in today's plants." Nuclear waste can be "pyrometallurgically" processed into a fuel for use in specially designed advanced fast-neutron reactors. "In particular, a relatively new form of nuclear technology could overcome the principle drawbacks of current methods (to produce electricity using nuclear energy) ... namely worries about reactor accidents, the potential for diversion of nuclear fuel into highly destructive weapons, the management of dangerous long-lived radioactive waste and the depletion of global reserves of economically available uranium." "President Jimmy Carter banned civilian reprocessing of nuclear fuel in the U.S. in 1977. He reasoned that if plutonium were not recovered from spent fuel it could not be used to make bombs. Carter also wanted America to set an example for the rest of the world. France, Japan, Russia and the U.K. have not, however, followed suit, so plutonium reprocessing for use in power plants continues in a number of countries." In the United States, nuclear waste, a valuable potential energy source, is planned to be buried at Yucca Mountain rather than reprocessed into useable fissionable fuel and radioactive waste. We believe that now is the time for the local, state and federal governments to agree to start construction at the Nevada Test Site of all the facilities required to "pyrometallurgically" process all nuclear waste to recover fuel for use in advanced fast-neutron reactors and into by-product fission products, the true waste "ashes" which make up about five percent of the used fuel. As laws are changed, the recovered fuel could be sold for use in commercial plants. The radioactivity of the "ashes" will drop to safe levels in a few hundred, rather than tens of thousands of years and could be stored in Yucca Mountain. We also believe that now is the time to start construction at the Nevada Test Site of all the facilities required for a commercial-size advanced fast-neutron reactor capable of burning the "pyrometallurgically" recovered fuel from nuclear waste to produce electricity for commercial use. This demonstration plant would be a model for commercial nuclear power plants. "More and more people are realizing that (nuclear energy) may be the most environmentally friendly way to generate large amounts of electricity ... If developed sensibly, nuclear power could be truly sustainable and essentially inexhaustible and could operate without contributing to climate change." As an elected person, please initiate or support legislation to: implement processing nuclear waste into usable fuel for advanced fast-neutron reactors on the Nevada Test Site and build an advanced fast-neutron reactor on the Nevada Test Site to produce commercial quantities of electricity. Please let us know your opinions on these subjects. CALVIN AND NORMA MORRISON |
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