Re: bush coming into the open over energy...first steps...


abelard wrote:
http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid=%7B20639DA3%2DBCC6%2D462D%2D9BB0%2D92D84B0E59F0%7D&siteid=google

"This morning, ( uhhhh duh..) I want to speak to you about one part of this initiative:
our plans to expand the use of safe and clean nuclear power. Nuclear power
generates large amounts of low-cost electricity without emitting air

[Bush's inane drivel snipped -- Yawn!]

WASHINGTON POST OP-ED:

Nuclear Energy Initiative Holds Uncertainties: Bush Plan Could Cut
Dependence on Oil but Relies on Unproven Technologies

By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, February 19, 2006; Page A09

President Bush's new nuclear energy initiative is supposed to help cure
America's "addiction to oil" by redesigning a taboo technology,
originally used to obtain plutonium for bombs, to reuse spent nuclear
fuel.

Unlike past reprocessing methods, the administration says, the new
technique would make it prohibitively difficult for would-be
proliferators to extract weapons-grade plutonium from spent fuel, and
it would drastically reduce the volume of radioactive waste to be
stored at repositories such as Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

The result, Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman said early this month,
would be increased use of nuclear power, reduced oil consumption and
fewer hydrocarbon emissions, "making the world a better, cleaner and
safer place to live."

If it works. Both supporters and opponents of the Global Nuclear Energy
Partnership agreed that although it marks a radical change in U.S.
nuclear energy policy, it also relies on unproven technologies that
will take decades to mature, and it does not guarantee success.

Bodman, in congressional testimony last week, acknowledged that the
$250 million requested for the program this year will be used to design
a test reprocessing plant so that Bush over "the next two or three
years" can make "a go or no-go decision as to whether this is something
that makes sense."

But one problem with this calculation, opponents say, is that even a
toe-wetting start-up requires that the United States reverse nearly 30
years of opposition to reprocessing at a time of increasing concern
about weapons programs in North Korea, Iran and other nations. That "is
the wrong signal to send," said Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned
Scientists, which opposes reprocessing.

Also, Lyman and others challenged the administration's view that the
new technology does not produce "proliferation proof" plutonium, and
suggested that would-be proliferators would almost certainly find new
ways to handle the spent fuel by the time the new system is ready.

Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell acknowledged these concerns but noted
that the U.S. refusal to reprocess spent fuel has been a stance "that
virtually no one [else] followed." The world "has moved on without us,"
he added, and a new technology that makes it harder to obtain plutonium
"will make the United States a leader rather than a spectator."

Still, there are other misgivings. Experts in both science and industry
doubt that the plan could meet what Sell called an "admittedly
aggressive time schedule" to have commercial reprocessing up and
running by 2025.

If development drags on, these experts say, reprocessing would have
little immediate effect on nuclear waste storage. Meanwhile, the
government will be spending billions of dollars developing a fuel that
probably will be too expensive to buy in the foreseeable future, except
with a government subsidy.

"I'm not dogmatic -- the claims may not ultimately be wrong," said
Richard K. Lester, a nuclear scientist at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. "But on the time scale that's going to matter, it's very
difficult to come close to achieving the objectives that have been
set."

Reprocessing technology was first developed by the United States in the
1950s as a way to obtain plutonium for nuclear warheads, but President
Jimmy Carter banned it in 1977 because of proliferation concerns.
President Ronald Reagan rescinded the ban in 1981, but even then,
reprocessing was so expensive and technologically daunting that no U.S.
power company ever sought to develop it.

France, Japan, Russia, India and the United Kingdom do reprocess
commercially, and all use the old U.S. technology, called purex, which
derives plutonium oxide from spent fuel and then combines it with
uranium to create a mixed-oxide fuel, called MOX, that can be used in
some power plants. MOX is much more expensive than the uranium fuel in
conventional reactors.

The conventional plants, which include all 103 nuclear generators
currently operating in the United States, use "once through" fuel rods
in a controlled reaction to produce steam that drives turbine
generators. The rods are replaced every 18 to 24 months, and the spent
fuel -- about 2,000 metric tons annually -- is put into temporary
storage on the reactor sites.

Eventually, the spent fuel is supposed to go to Yucca Mountain, which
will open, at the earliest, in 2012. By that time, the industry will
have 70,000 metric tons of spent fuel waiting to ship to it.

"We need to solve a couple of big problems," said Phillip J. Finck,
deputy associate director for applied science technology and national
security at Argonne National Laboratory. "We have to deal with the
waste and destroy plutonium."

The new technology, as described by Finck in a telephone interview,
begins with a new reprocessing technique called urex-plus, which, like
purex, dissolves spent fuel rods in a bath of nitric acid. The used
fuel rods are composed of uranium, plutonium, heavy radioactive metals
called "transuranics" and lighter radioactive elements known as
"fission products."

Unlike purex, which separates out the plutonium, urex-plus leaves the
plutonium and transuranics mixed together, making the resulting product
unsuitable for weapons and much more difficult to handle for anyone
trying to build a bomb.

The new fuel would be used in a "fast reactor," where neutrons move
about much more energetically than in conventional reactors, breaking
down the long-lived transuranics into lighter fission products with
shorter half-lives.

The spent fuel from the fast reactor would then be reprocessed using
another new technology known as "pyroprocessing," which separates the
fuel by dissolving it in molten salt and running an electric current
through it. The fuel could be recycled several times until the
long-lived transuranics all but disappear.

If successful, the new reprocessing method would replace purex, the
stockpile of civilian plutonium would stop growing, and the whole cycle
would become much more proliferation resistant, Finck said. Also, he
added, Yucca Mountain's storage capacity "would increase by a factor of
100." Instead of filling up by 2030, or earlier, the repository would
last beyond the end of the century.

That is if the new reprocessing system is ready by 2025. Steven Kraft,
senior director of used fuel management for the Nuclear Energy
Institute, an industry policy group, voiced doubts: "This is a matter
of developing future technologies, and those technologies are 50 to 60
years away."

Kraft endorsed Bush's plan as a worthy long-range goal, but
nonproliferation advocates said impurities in reprocessed plutonium are
not likely to dissuade would-be proliferators from stealing it.

Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and
Environmental Research, an energy think tank, said: "You can get a
one-kiloton explosion with impure plutonium, and if you're a terrorist
the most important thing is to have the capability. Such a blast would
be the equivalent of 1,000 tons of dynamite. "You don't care whether
you destroy the tip of Manhattan or the whole island," he said.


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