Michele Kearney's Nuclear Wire

Major Energy and Environmental News and Commentary affecting the Nuclear Industry.

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

The Case for Recycling Nuclear Waste

The Case for Recycling Nuclear Waste

Climate activists love to champion solar and wind power, but few have kind words for the most potent source of renewable energy: nuclear power. Although today’s critics point to calamities such as Fukushima and Chernobyl, opposition to nuclear power goes back decades earlier, even before the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 helped popularize the anti-nuke sentiment. One common criticism involves the problem of radioactive waste. But that problem is not wholly intractable—it’s largely caused by reversible choices that our political leaders have made, according to economist and Independent Institute Research Director William F. Shughart II. http://www.independent.org/publications/the_lighthouse/detail.asp?id=1569#3965

Indeed, France and Great Britain are two countries that deal with nuclear waste in a manner diametrically opposite the path chosen by American politicians. Whereas U.S. law prohibits the recycling of nuclear waste—and thereby makes the disposal problem exclusively one of long-term storage—France and England permit nuclear waste to be recycled. France, for example, allows its 58 nuclear power plants to send spent fuel rods to a recycling facility on the Normandy coast, where after a three-year cooling period the waste is turned into mixed-oxide fuel.

Strangely, the Savannah River nuclear site in western South Carolina will be allowed to make the same mixed-oxide fuel from surplus plutonium of U.S. weapons stockpiles, but not from nuclear waste. This double standard makes no sense. If the U.S. government were to let nuclear power-plant operators recycle their waste, climate activists would get two of their wishes: the country could obtain more energy using less fossil fuel, and the storage-space needed for nuclear waste would fall—by more than 50 percent, according to Shughart. Moreover, fewer local political battles over where to put long-term storage sites would break out. “Instead of requiring a political consensus on multiple repository sites to store nuclear plant waste,” Shughart writes, “one facility would be sufficient, reducing disposal costs by billions of dollars.”

Why Doesn’t U.S. Recycle Nuclear Fuel?, by William F. Shughart II (Forbes, 10/1/14)
The Failed Promise of Nuclear Power, by William Beaver (The Independent Review, Winter 2011)
The Demise of Yucca Mountain, by William Beaver (The Independent Review, Spring 2010)

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