Prof. Peterson made exactly that point which is why I footnoted a link to his paper. It does run against conventional wisdom, does it not? I'd wear gloves, personally and there would be some dose from doing so but the extraction could be performed without fatality, according to the good professor.

Sorry to sound flippant, but we have been seduced before by great-sounding ideas that have turned out to have significant (and lethal) downsides. I just hope all this happy-talk won't lead us to the terrible consequences possible when we deal with things nuclear.

All in all, good argument, but I'd like to hear more discussion. We were never told about the incredible costs and subsidies that are necessary for nuclear power, the Price-Anderson Act among them. If nuclear power is so darn safe, why won't insurance companies insure it without the government (and our money) taking almost the entire risk?

If you want to do this, it should pay for itself without subsidy.

The energy embodied in the spent fuel is going to be very attractive indeed at some future date. Assuming of course that we haven't had some sort of a breakthrough by then, and consider nuclear fission as quaint as flint chips. :)

Your question "If nuclear power is so darn safe, why won't insurance companies insure it without the government (and our money) taking almost the entire risk?"

Can you name ANY specific instance in the long history of commercial nuclear power operations in the US where the US government has had to pay out under Price-Andersen? This is a rhetorical question because the answer is that you can't - what "terrible costs" are you referring to? The US industry carries substantial private first coverage and regularly receives full refunds on its premiums.

Your question really speaks more to the state of our legal system than to the inherent physical risks from nuclear power generation. To engage in commercial supply or operation of a nuclear power plant would to play "You bet your company" without Price-Anderson. Look at the jury trial payouts for individuals for malpractice and pharmaceuticals. A reform of our tort system could very well negate the need for Price-Andersen.

An economist would see Yucca Mountain as internalizing an externality. A careful read of my article will show that my specific intent is to REDUCE the "subsidy" you oppose by a factor of 5.

I'm all for discussing ways to reduce costs.

to Mr. McAmuk:

It would be interesting to compare a completed Yucca Mountain to the so-far discover uranium ore bodies. I'd guess that Yucca Mountain would have an extremely high economic value. My rough guess of the fissile content is that it is equal to 6 years global production of yellowcake.

And there's the rub. Senator Reid and the rest of the anti-nuclear, anti-Yucca crowd see transportation as the weak link and are doing everything they can to convince people that a single accident will contaminate thousands of square miles for eternity. They want to leave it where it is forever.

I know, and you know, that the transportation of spent fuel is perfectly safe and the probability of a significant release is effectively zero. How do we convince the masses of this? I have been in the nuclear business for fifty years and for the last thirty years, I have been involved in the transportation of radioactive materials. The technical problems have been solved, but not the institutional, public relations problem.

Bill Teer

So one important plank in approaching the public is acknowledging that they're already on your side. The public wants nuclear energy. If that means transporting spent nuclear fuel, they are unconcerned. It it means leaving it at the stations that generate it for decades, generations, or centuries, that's OK too. They know it hasn't done anyone any harm and are confident that in this regard, past performance is a reliable predictor of future results; and they know that alternative forms of spent fuel routinely do much harm, i.e., spent nuclear fuel could get a lot more dangerous without, in the process, disestablishing nuclear power as a large-scale net lifesaver.

Respect the public.

--- Graham Cowan, former hydrogen fan
boron as energy carrier: real-car range, nuclear cachet

Two other facts that, to me, make the logic of recycling obvious even to politicians:

1. The U.S. Navy has been sucessfully transporting and recyling spent nuclear fuel for over 40 years with absolutely NO problems.

2. The last reactor core operated in the Shippingport Atomic Power Station proved that a standard pressurized water reactor can be sucessfully converted to a breeder reactor, creating an almost infinite source of energy for the country. The problem: we have no capability to reprocess and reclaim the fuel after breeding.

Oh, and by the way, what makes the better sense from a security standpoint; reprocessing the spent fuel or having it parked at a hundred or so different sites throughout the county?

There are no genuine security concerns for either kind of spent fuel storage, post-reprocessing in one place or unreprocessed in many. If the one place were the deep ocean, and the reprocessed form totally dissolved and its radioactive contents mixed through the whole ocean, it would be dishonest to say that by this the ocean had been made radioactive. Dishonest, in exactly the same sense that it would be so to claim the saltshakers that went down with the Titanic had made the sea salt: the increment would be a relatively small one to a pre-existing, much larger naturally occurring amount.

What is Bernadowski's evidence for his contention that the US Navy has been reprocessing spent fuel? For sure nothing reprocessed goes into their propulsion cores; these are, IIRC, 90 percent 235-U, 10 percent 238. Burn one of those for 10 or 15 full-power years and such 239-Pu as is produced tends also to get burned. There's not much to be recovered by reprocessing.

--- Graham Cowan, former hydrogen fan
boron as energy carrier: real-car range, nuclear cachet

The political issues were, as you noted, not addressed in depth.

The main problem with recycling is that there is no political constituency for it. The people who are paying for the Yucca Mountain Project (YMP) contribute pennies each month as a hidden tax in their power bills. The firms designing YMP have no incentive to break their government rice bowl. The anti-nuclear people do NOT want an answer to their perennial question “But what about the waste?” The mining industry sees lost yellowcake sales. The utilities are happy with once-through fuel cycle so long as the government takes the spent fuel off their hands. Congress is happy having extra cash to spend. It’s the classic problem of a little from a lot going to a few.

That’s why I started the title with “How Harry Reid…” He’s in a position of power and has been very vocal against YMP. Here’s a great opportunity to do something else AND save taxpayer money. I’ve forwarded the link to Senator Reid’s staffer assigned to YMP but have not heard back.

YMP is the logical conseqence of a Jimmy Carter gesture almost 30 years. Times change.

to Mr. Teer:

The transportation of spent nuclear fuel has always appeared to me to be a diversion, a last straw for the opposition to YMP. Few worried about it until some heavy political muscle started to inflate the issue. It's the "snail darter" of the nuclear industry. That said, get a bigger consensus on recycle and I expect this issue to fade. But I've been wrong before.

We are all on the same side of the problem of producing energy, but are debating the mechanisms.

"Please do not put words in the mouths of those who question our ability to deal with nuclear wastes."

Why would I do that? At heart, this article questions the wisdom of our current policies and intentions for dealing with nuclear waste. I offer what I hoped was a coherent alternative plan. It looks to me that our options are bury it or burn it. Something MUST be done since we've got tonnes of it sitting around! Got a better idea?

Previously I directly quoted a question from you concerning Price-Anderson, then proceded to give a very specific answer based on the facts of US insurance coverage and claim histories. My criticism of the American legal system and its practioners is, granted, a more vague response but one for which there is a large volume of more detailed criticism elsewhere, dating back to Shakespeare, at least.

In what way did I "put words in the mouths"? Constructive criticism is always welcome, especially when it is focused on the issue at hand.

http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/ (scroll down to the 3rd article for Friday, 10/7)

My two main fears would be summed up as follows. One, it will result in a significantly increased cost obligation to the industry, making nuclear power less competitive. Second, it will basically start the process all over again, and allow people to continue to say that “we have no idea what to do with the waste” for several more decades. Increasing nuclear’s costs, and letting anti-nukes keep their most potent “argument” will result in fewer nuclear plants (and more coal plants) being built in the next few decades. If a single coal plant gets built in the future (in lieu of a nuclear plant), the resulting increase in public health risk, both short-term and long-term, will exceed those from Yucca. Mtn.

As long as it’s designed so that the fuel is retrievable, there really aren’t any downsides to proceeding with Yucca Mtn., given that we will need at least one repository anyway even if we reprocess. Yucca Mtn. provides an acceptable (negligible long term risk) waste solution right now, thus eliminating the “we have no solution” argument, while fully allowing the use of even better solutions in the future. Even if we do reprocess, it will be done at a centralized site, so we will have to ship the spent fuel somewhere anyway. Why not just ship it to (and store it at) Yucca Mtn.?

We can wait till 2040 or 2050 to begin reprocessing and still avoid a 2nd repository. My plan would be do spend a few more decades developing better, more cost-effective reprocessing technology, while putting the spent fuel from the first plant generation in Yucca Mtn. Then, around 2050 or so, we start reprocessing. We not only reprocess the waste from the new plants, but we pull out spent fuel from Yucca Mtn. and reprocess it as well. Then we stuff all the resulting HLW back in the mountain. If done right, a 2nd repository would never be needed.

One thing the industry shouldn’t stand for is having additional financial burdens placed on it for waste management. They are already paying out funds sufficient to build repositories that are (must be) shown by analysis to result in negligible health risk over an indefinite time period. Meanwhile, other energy sources (e.g., coal) are allowed to inflict massive public health costs (estimated to equate to ~5-7 cents/kW-hrs by many studies), without having to do anything about it or pay any compensation! They should not accept paying a waste management fee significantly higher than 0.1 cents/kW-hr, or paying significantly more for MOX fuel, until and unless coal is required to emit no pollutants AND sequester all of its CO2. It’s only fair! If the govt. wants to eat a significant financial loss on reprocessing, just so they can avoid the political hassle of siting new repositories, that’s their business.

My guess is that the companies that are considering building NEW nuclear power plants, at government behest, are showing a bit of reluctance. Why should they build new plants without some better plan for the spent fuel that will be generated? Are they to be left holding the bag, AGAIN? This is part of our energy policy that needs to be squared away, and quickly - we techies are doing our part.

While I'm a huge nuclear power booster, someone needs to point out to our elected representatives that this $80 billion is very roughly $1,000 per family in America, albeit at pennies a month. Ultimately, the consumer and taxpayers are the ones to pay, NOT the operators.

Mr. Hopf and Mr. Gould seem to miss the CRITICAL point that with actinide burners, the residual waste is merely fission products with a much shorter half life. A repository for fission products does not need anything like a Yucca Mountain design. A repository for fission products would be much cheaper and could be located in many more locations. I will certainly grant that we have no special urgency to begin reprocessing and, in fact, more aging lowers costs. I do think it good policy to move it off the current reactor sites and put it in one or two closely guarded sites - I suspect current reactor owners agree since NEI is so advocating. A central storage site is cheap, too.

My analysis is of capital expenses of Yucca Mountain vs. the capital costs of reprocessing plants, fission product vitrification facilities, actinide fuel fabrication plants, and two actinide burners. These are all ballpark numbers but they appear hugely in favor of recycle.

I also acknowledged that the differences in operating expenses between a once-through cycle and a recycle cycle would be against recycle, at least at earlier yellowcake prices. However, yellowcake prices are expected to trend up I would estimate that the uranium+plutonium to be buried in Yucca Mountain is worth about $15 billion in comparable natural yellowcake at $21/lb at .2% tails. At what yellowcake price is recycle worthwhile just for material savings? Perhaps the French and the British offer examples - somehow, it works for them TODAY.

So, if the capital costs of the fuel reprocessing plant and reactor-grade MOX fabrication plant are charged against the Yucca Mountain savings, what would be the operating expenses differences? I haven't an analysis of this. I can state that current fuel costs (materials, conversion, SWUs, fabrication) are NOT the major cost component of nuclear electricity. If we assume that the overall utility fuel expense increases by 50%, then the busbar cost difference would not change by more than 20% and probably not that.

Ultimately, I seriously doubt that additional recycle expenses will change the competitive position of new nuclear power plants going forward. Do we really want to spend $100 billion to bury $15 billion worth of fuel? How can we allocate capital savings against increased operating expenses?

If someone wants to provide more detailed cost analysis of the operating costs and savings, I'd love to read it. I didn't explore it in more detail here because my hunch is that it is not determining from a policy veiwpoint.

As to "environmentalists", their reluctance to participate in rational, civil debate on vital national energy policy issues will just cut them out of the deal. If they refuse to play, they don't deserve a seat at the table. Let them eat coal dust.

Unfortunately, that just adds one more political player, United States Enrichment Corp (USEC) to NOT be enthused about recycle. They're planning a big new centrifuge enrichment plant. Going to recycle will just cut their market down the road. Of course, if they wanted to be the government's agent in building and operating reprocessing plants, much like they have the franchise for Russian warhead recycling, their business would grow.

A final point is that Yucca Mountain is designed for the CURRENT nuclear fleet (plus some defense waste.) NEW nuclear power plants are not accommodated. To do so would change the licensing basis and enlarge the physical scope. As a thought experiment, doubling our nuclear fleet would cost $300 billion. To add another Yucca Mountain could cost another $100 billion.

That's no way to run a railroad.... or a 21st Century electric system.

So "yellowcake prices are expected to trend up"? That's basically wrong, no matter who the unidentified expectors are, or how numerous, for any timescale in which fuel pins from the earliest spent CANDU bundles aren't cool enough to be used as slats in a playpen. The price of prospecting previously unknown high-grade terrestrial uranium deposits is near three cents per TBOE. Add in ~20 cents per TBOE to extract it, and you're still not talking about real money.

All the uranium mines now operating were able to pay their way when uranium prices were below US$10 per pound U3O8. That means below 25 US cents per TBOE (Thermal Barrel-of-Oil-Equivalent). The present price of almost 80 cents a TBOE is very close to an extremely immovable ceiling set by marine uranium extraction at $US1-2 per TBOE.

Strictly speaking, that ceiling is not immovable, rather, it's very, very hard to lift. Improvements in extraction technology can certainly lower it.

--- Graham Cowan, former hydrogen fan
boron as energy carrier: real-car range, nuclear cachet

Good points and I hope you're right! However, in the SHORT-run, prices will escalate until new mines are opened. I mentioned in the article that yellowcake is a commodity and subject, like all commodities, to volitilty. And the short run (3 to 5 years) really doesn't matter for policy decisions about Yucca Mountain and recycle, except to nervous politicians.

Here's a great source for info on the nuclear fuel cycle:

http://www.converdyn.com/press_room/presentations.html

Using Converdyn's cost numbers, a fuel reload costs about $40 million. About half that is SWUs and less than a quarter is fabrication. Recycle might need half the SWU requirements and double the fabrication costs, ignoring the $12 million for yellowcake -it would be a wash! Remember that a big nuclear power plants can sell $500 million in electricity a year at wholesale prices.

I think I was justified in ignoring recycle expense increases in my evaluation of capital costs.

As far as the issue of coal’s externalities, everyone knows the “solution” to the problem. It’s just a matter of political will. All I was saying is that, given what coal gets away with, if I were the nuclear industry I would resist paying even more to eliminate trivial remaining externalities.

I’ll have to give you the reference(s) Monday, but current reprocessing technology creates new fuel at an equivalent mined uranium ore cost of $1,000/kg, versus today’s price of ~$60/kg. Paying $1000/kg for new “fuel” would translate into an increase in nuclear power cost of up to 2 cents/kW-hr. The price of uranium will never get anywhere near this high, so reprocessing will never make sense as an economic “fuel source”.

On the other hand, it can make sense as a waste management option. Due to the tremendous power of long-term compounding interest, it is easy to afford large final, back end expenses, because they are deferred by several decades. Yucca is a perfect example of this, where its “huge” $60 billion cost is fully covered by a mere 0.1 cent/kW-hr fee charged on power when it’s generated. I don’t know of any studies on how much cheaper Yucca Mtn. would be if it only had to take HLW, but (of course) the savings would be some fraction of the total cost of 0.1 cents/kW-hr (i.e., a very nominal cost).

My guess is that the industry would be more than willing to pay (waste?) ~0.05 cents/kW-hr for the privilege of moving the spent fuel off their sites and being able to say that the waste problem has been solved. This will help tremendously in getting public acceptance for new reactors. I think most don’t sufficiently appreciate what the political effect will be if we announce that we are giving up on Yucca Mtn., after decades of effort, and are going back to the drawing board. The nuclear utility executives do, which is why they are adamant that Yucca goes forward before they’ll consider building new reactors (other than the first, heavily subsidies few, perhaps).

Anyway, due to this same long-term interest effect, you may very well be right that we could pay for reprocessing using the funds already collected from the 0.1 cent/kW-hr fee (despite the fact that the costs are up to $1000/kg), depending on how great the repository cost savings are. I think it’s more likely that, while their might not be much savings related to making Yucca Mtn. cheaper, there may be significant savings, as well as the avoidance of major political costs/hassles, in avoiding additional repositories. Reprocessing may indeed turn out to be less expensive than the cost of additional repositories. If we allow for a couple more decades of reprocessing research, the likelihood of this goes up dramatically.

Isn't any other solution (reprocesing, Yucca / not Yucca etc) simply addressing the symptoms and not the disease?

If we step back and weigh our options once again, and do so with clear vision and with courage, I think we'll arrive at a different decision. The disease, as Mr. Gould suggests, is not Yucca Mountain but a failure of moral courage in America's elites.

The current inititatives to build new nuclear power plants must consider a fact - Yucca Mountain is not being built for anything beyond the current fleet - there will be no room, as presently conceived, for the waste from the plants being encouraged under the Energy Bill. As a result, the new plant owners will be stuck with the spent fuel that they generate until some future law is passed.

A decison to go to recycle and actinide burning could not only accomodate a huge expansion of our reactor fleet, it could provide the fuel for them, relieving strain on world yellowcake production. Only recycle allows nuclear power to fulfill its role of providing electricity for our posterity.

The following link is for a large recent report on the issue of reprocessing economics:

www.whrc.org/resources/published_literature/ pdf/BunnetalProjAtomHarvard.03.pdf

The report confirms that the cost of per ton of (uranium-equivalent) fuel from current reprocessing (~$1000/kg) is much higher than the cost of mined uranium (~$40/kg), making reprocessing very uneconomic IF thought of purely as a source of fuel. However, when viewed as a waste management option (thereby taking advantage of the long-term interest effect), the additional cost of the entire fuel cycle (over the direct disposal approach) is only on the order of a tenth of a cent or so per kW-hr, which is very manageable and acceptable.

Although the price of uranium ore has to get ridiculously high before reprocessing is actually less expensive, strictly speaking, this misses the point that the overall cost differences in question are minimal, and may be worth accepting if there are significant political or public acceptance benefits. For these reasons, I'm inclined to support reprocessing for the waste stream of the next generation of reactors, in order to avoid additional repositories. Once again, however, we don't need to start reprocessing that fuel for decades.

A link to NEI's weekly newsletter, which discusses more on the Reid/Domenici legislation, and the industry's view on it is at:

http://member.nei.org/cgi-bin/QueryTools/Redirect/JumpToTopDoc.asp?category=pdfoverview

(although unfortunately, I think it's a members only site)

There is also an interesting Las Vegas Sun article on the subject at:

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2005/oct/11/519492881.html

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

"Releases in 1982 from worldwide combustion of 2800 million tons of coal totaled 3640 tons of uranium (containing 51,700 pounds of uranium-235) and 8960 tons of thorium."

These are only the airborn flyash releases, after presuming a(n optomistic imho) 99.5% efficient flyash precipitator. If fact, anyone concerned with in future running out of radioactive fuel for reactors should consider hoarding the ash waste from coalburners. (1.2 ppm uranium original, concentrated 5x by burning off the carbon, makes it almost a viable ore source fror reactor fuel)

"When considering the nuclear consequences of coal combustion, policymakers should look at the data and recognize that the amount of uranium-235 alone dispersed by coal combustion is the equivalent of dozens of nuclear reactor fuel loadings." (eg. they've calculated some stats which are fascinating. "According to 1982 figures, 111 American nuclear plants consumed about 540 tons of nuclear fuel, generating almost 1.1 x 10E12 kWh of electricity. During the same year, about 801 tons of uranium alone were released from American coal-fired plants. Add 1971 tons of thorium, and the release of nuclear components from coal combustion far exceeds the entire U.S. consumption of nuclear fuels. The same conclusion applies for worldwide nuclear fuel and coal combustion.")

Granted, of the 801 tons of uranium, perhaps only 8 tons were fissile U235, which makes the release comparable to about 160 tons of 5% enriched reactor fuel.

Still, there is no escaping the conclusion that, if the nuclear energy industry were regulated in the same manner as the coal generation industry, it would be free to simply incinerate it's spent fuel and freely disperse it a airborne stack emissions.

I've found your reference and will read it carefully. I'm skeptical of the result your quoted and think we may be using differing assumptions. It's over a 100 pages so it might be this weekend before I can reply.

Mr. Gould,

I vaguely remember coal plants on the Ohio River being told early on to stop dumping their flyash into the river as it exceed radioactive release limits. Sounds like a tall tale but has some plausiblity.

All,

I've noticed that the NEI has taken a vigorous stand demanding Yucca Mountain proceed just as it is (see their blog). While I'm supportive of NEI and the nuclear industry, being a vocal veteran, their legitmate interest is twofold - in the DOE taking physical possession of the spent fuel on the plant sites per law and ensuring that future plants have arrangements for the same. Both are valid issues where we hold the moral high ground.

Where the NEI is exceeding its authority is demanding that the particular Yucca Mountain Project proceed as currently designed. After all, the owners of nuclear power plants are NOT the ones paying for Yucca Mountain - the ratepayers are and we the public have legitimate interest in how and what we are being billed for.

They are being responsible corporate citizens in insisting that a solution be found for nuclear waste but insisting on a more expensive option because it may be more convenient for them is subject to criticism from those who are footing the bill. The nuclear polant operators also would have a legitimate interest in any government mandate for using MOX fuel, whether reactor-grade or weapons-grade. However, millions of households in the US are required to recycle household waste - the same could well be required of our nuclear power plants.

I hope that this is just inside-the-beltway posturing at this time.

Natural uranium plus all its daughter radioisotopes in equilibrium produces, IIRC, 0.000092 W/kg (this . Sanity check, that implies 20 trillion tonnes of it in the continents make 2 trillion alpha-decay watts. This seems right; there was some recent news about this, perhaps accessible with search phrase "neutrino tomography".

Ignoring the distinction between natural uranium by itself and natural uranium plus its daughters, we can compare this 0.000092 W/kg with the 40 kW a kilogram of uranium might produce while in service in a reactor, and the 2.97 watts it residually makes five years after retiring from a 1,250-day period of 40-kW service at 40 kW, and see that it's 32,000 times more radioactive than it was just before it went in. Even if governments weren't fossil fuel-interested, no-one would incinerate this, nor try to. Governments without conflict of interest would not, of course, have any objection to its being dumped in the ocean; no civil servant aware of the practice would shy away from owning beachfront property, as I point out above with a comparison to salt from the larders on the Titanic. The fraction is larger but still well below 1.

--- Graham Cowan, former hydrogen fan
boron as energy carrier: real-car range, nuclear cachet

Here's an update from August, 2008, that revises the costs upwards to $96 billion.

http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/info_library/newsroom/documents/8_5_08_FINAL_TSLCC_PR.pdf

Given the years to go before Yucca opening, I might have been too low in my projection.