GAO: DOE Should Reassess Building Approach to Spent Nuclear Fuel Recycling Facilities
June 9, 2008 // Published as a news service by IHS
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The approach of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for building engineering-scale facilities would meet Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) objectives if the advanced technologies on which it focused could be successfully developed and commercialized, according to a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).
The advanced technologies would reduce waste to a greater degree than existing technologies by recycling radioactive material that a geologic repository has limited capacity to accommodate, according to the report.
The advanced technologies would also mitigate proliferation risks relative to existing technologies by increasing the difficulty of theft or diversion of weapons-usable nuclear material from recycling facilities, according to the report.
Nonetheless, the DOE's engineering-scale approach had two shortcomings, according to the report.
First, it lacked industry participation potentially reducing the prospects for eventual commercialization of the technologies.
In particular, the approach included some technologies that may introduce unnecessary costs and technical challenges while creating waste management challenges; industry representatives questioned whether such technologies could be commercialized.
Second, the DOE's schedule called for building one of the recycling facilities (a reprocessing plant for separating reusable materials from spent nuclear fuel and fabricating recycled fuel) before conducting R&D on recycled fuel that would help determine the plant's design requirements.
This schedule unnecessarily increased the risk that the spent fuel would be separated in a form that cannot be recycled, according to the report.
The other two facilities the DOE planned to build (an advanced reactor for using recycled fuel and an R&D facility) would allow the DOE to conduct R&D that existing DOE facilities have limited capability to support.
The DOE's accelerated approach of building full-scale facilities would likely require using unproven evolutions of existing technologies that would reduce radioactive waste and mitigate proliferation risks to a much lesser degree than anticipated from more advanced technologies, according to the report.
Two of the four industry groups that received funding under GNEP proposed evolutionary technologies for recycling spent fuel in existing reactors even though the GNEP strategic plan ruled out such technologies.
While the evolutionary technologies could allow the DOE to begin recycling a large amount of spent fuel sooner than under its original approach, fully meeting the GNEP's waste reduction and nonproliferation objectives would require a later transition to more advanced technologies, according to the report.
Two other industry groups proposed technologies that would address the GNEP's waste reduction and nonproliferation objectives by using technologies that are not mature enough to allow the DOE to accelerate construction of full-scale recycling facilities, according to the report.
Under any of the proposals, the DOE is unlikely to attract enough industry investment to avoid the need for a large amount of government funding for full-scale facilities, according to the report.
For example, the industry groups proposed that the DOE fund an advanced reactor, which the DOE and industry officials expect would at least initially be more expensive than existing reactors to build and operate and thus not be commercially competitive.
The DOE acknowledges the limitations of its accelerated approach but cites other benefits such as the potential to exert more immediate international influence on nonproliferation issues, according to the report.
The GAO recommends that the DOE reassess its preference for accelerating the GNEP.
Purpose of Study
The DOE proposed under the GNEP to build facilities to begin recycling the nation's commercial spent nuclear fuel.
The GNEP's objectives include reducing radioactive waste disposed of in a geologic repository and mitigating the nuclear proliferation risks of existing recycling technologies.
The DOE originally planned a small engineering-scale demonstration of advanced recycling technologies being developed by the DOE national laboratories.
While the DOE has not ruled out this approach, the current GNEP strategic plan favors working with industry to demonstrate the latest commercially available technology in full-scale facilities and to do so in a way that will attract industry investment.
The DOE funded four industry groups to prepare proposals for full-scale facilities.
The DOE officials expect the secretary of energy to decide on an approach to the GNEP by the end of 2008.
The GAO evaluated the extent to which the DOE would address the GNEP's objectives under (1) its original engineering-scale approach and (2) the accelerated approach to building full-scale facilities.
Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).