One Third US CO2 emmissions cut, using Nuke Reprocessing

Pocari Sweat

www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17059

Thursday, July 20, 2006
The Best Nuclear Option
The U.S. Energy Department's fuel-recycling initiative could be a distraction from a more achievable goal: reviving today's nuclear industry and averting some carbon emissions in the short term.
By Matthew L. Wald

Imagine a nuclear industry that can power America for decades using its own radioactive garbage, burning up the parts of today's reactor wastes that are the hardest to dispose of. Add technology that takes nuclear chaff, uranium that was mined and processed but was mostly unusable, and converts it to still more fuel. Then add a global business model that makes it much less likely that reactor by-products such as plutonium will find their way into nuclear weapons in countries like Iran, even as economical nuclear-power technology becomes available to the whole world.

That is the alluring triple play the Bush administration hopes to turn with the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) it unveiled earlier this year, a proposed long-term research and development program almost as audacious as the Manhattan Project. The basic fuel-reprocessing concepts at its heart have been kicking around for the better part of a half-century. Now they are being touted anew as a way to provide plentiful carbon-free fuel for an energy-hungry world threatened by human-induced climate change.

Under the plan, for which the administration has requested $250 million for the fiscal year beginning October 1, the United States and certain partner countries would process spent nuclear fuel using new techniques that would turn some of it into more fuel and minimize the amount requiring disposal. The United States and its partners would also lease reactor fuel to other countries, which would then return their spent fuel to be reprocessed.

The technology could exploit uranium far more efficiently: Phillip J. Finck, associate director at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, says it could extract up to 100 times as much energy from uranium as is now possible. With the waste now piled up at reactors around the United States, the theory goes, GNEP could produce all the electricity the country will need for decades, maybe even centuries -- assuming enough of the necessary new reactors could be built. That would eliminate about a third of all U.S. carbon dioxide emissions (roughly the portion that today comes from fossil-fuel power plants). All this while reducing waste and thwarting the diversion of fuel to nuclear weapons.

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