Radioactive waste reprocessing from U.S. nuclear power plants, which has never worked in the United States, is being proposed in Washington.
Congress earmarked $50 million last month for the Energy Department to explore a new kind of reprocessing, one that would reuse a much larger fraction of the waste than had been attempted in the past, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
"Reprocessing, or processing spent fuel before it's put in the repository, is a very good way to buy time," said Roger W. Gale, a former Energy Department official who is now an electricity consultant. "It's a fail-safe in case we continue to have problems with Yucca Mountain."
However, there are still questions if Yucca Mountain will be opened as a disposal site and Ernest J. Moniz, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that if the world built enough reactors to provide energy without contributing to global warming, a new Yucca Mountain would be needed every 3.5 years.
The only U.S. nuclear reprocessing plant built in the 1960s in West Valley, N.Y., left U.S. taxpayers with a cleanup bill of more than $2 billion.
Copyright 2005 by United Press International
Related stories:
Americans Warming to Nuclear Power - MIT Survey
Americans' icy attitudes toward nuclear power are beginning to thaw, according to a new survey from MIT. The report also found a U.S. public increasingly unhappy with oil and more willing to develop alternative energy sources like wind and solar.
20 years of Yucca Mountain research now available for scientific review
The scientific community can now take a long-awaited look at the research behind the selection of Yucca Mountain, Nevada, as the nation's high-level radioactive waste repository.
Radiation degrades nuclear waste-containing materials faster than expected
Minerals intended to entrap nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years may be susceptible to structural breakdown within 1,400 years, a team from the University of Cambridge and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory reported this week in the journal
Nature.
Plutonium or greenhouse gases? Weighing the energy options
Can nuclear energy save us from global warming? Perhaps, but the tradeoffs involved are sobering: thousands of metric tons of nuclear waste generated each year and a greatly increased risk of nuclear weapons proliferation or diversion of nuclear material into terrorists' hands.
Researcher urges nuclear waste options
The Bush administration is eagerly pushing nuclear power as a way to help solve the U.S. energy crisis. But in its new plan for nuclear waste management, the administration is taking the wrong approach, says an MIT professor who studies the nuclear energy industry.
Feds unveil Yucca Mountain cleanup plans
U.S. Energy Department officials have announced plans to make Yucca Mountain a "clean" nuclear waste dump, but Nevada officials aren't happy.
New alloy verified for safer disposal of spent nuclear energy fuel
A new alloy developed and patented by researchers at Lehigh University, Sandia National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory could help the U.S. dispose more safely of 50,000 tons of spent nuclear energy fuel that are now stored at 125 sites in 39 states.
John DuPont, professor of materials science and engineering at Lehigh and principal investigator on the project, said that a nickel-based alloy with added gadolinium showed far greater ability than any other alloy to absorb the deadly radioactive neutrons emitted by nuclear waste.
Yucca Mountain: Good spot for nuke waste?
A U.S. government study suggests the proposed Yucca Mountain radioactive waste repository in Nevada is arguably the best location for such storage.