The United States should hold off on nuclear fuel reprocessing, until the proliferation concerns around the process are addressed, a former National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) official said recently.
In a May interview with Exchange Monitor, Scott Roecker, who formerly served as the director of the Office of Nuclear Material Removal at NNSA, told the Monitor that the separated plutonium in reprocessing is not worth the reusable fuel.
Nuclear fuel reprocessing is a chemical process that extracts usable uranium and plutonium from spent nuclear fuel.
The plutonium leftover, which Roecker said is weapons-grade usable material, puts the country at risk of it being stolen and repurposed for a nuclear weapon. He said that, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, eight kilograms, which is around 20 pounds, of separated plutonium would be required for a nuclear weapon.
Roecker, who is the lead advisor for the Nuclear Scaling Initiative and a vice president with the Nuclear Threat Initiative, said these concerns of proliferation from reprocessing are more prevalent today than before.
This week, the Department of Energy selected several nuclear companies, including Oklo, for continued negotiations to use Cold War-era plutonium for fuel under the Surplus Plutonium Utilization Program. Roecker said this has been on his radar and he has reservations about it.
“If you start exporting Oklo reactors all over the world for countries that are interested in it, you’re going to have this weapons-usable nuclear material in a whole bunch of new locations,” Roecker said.
Roecker said there are only 22 countries that have over one kilogram of weapons-usable materials. He said that there were over 50 countries a few decades ago.
“It has been a major effort by the U.S. government to reduce that number over these years, so for us to just open the door for a number of countries to get this opens up a whole can of worms around security and proliferation,” Roecker said.
In recent months, there has been growing interest in fuel reprocessing. In DOE’s Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus request for information (RFI) is a recent example. Roecker said the RFI was a good starting point in addressing the front-end and the more-so politically sensitive back-end of the nuclear fuel lifecycle.
There has been growing bipartisan interest from lawmakers about the possibility of reprocessing as well. Roecker said that lawmakers are likely getting half of the story when it comes to reprocessing.
“They’re only getting the promises that we’ll be able to take this spent fuel and turn it into a resource, and it will be fantastic, but they’re not hearing about the downsides,” Roecker said. “They’re not hearing about the cost associated with it, they’re not hearing about the proliferation concerns. They’re not hearing the real stories about what’s happening in other countries.”
The United Kingdom is home to the most civilian separated plutonium and the country has decided to place it in long-term storage with eventual plans for disposal. Roecker said that the U.K.understands that trying to make plutonium into fuel is more of a liability than an asset. “It is telling.”
Beyond proliferation, Roecker considers reprocessing more so an experiment than a surefire way to retrieve new fuel. He said France has been reprocessing for years and has only managed to use 1% of the reprocessed material for additional fuel.
Japan has pursued a fuel reprocessing facility for decades in the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant, but it has not come to fruition yet, Roecker said. The Japanese facility was scheduled to be in operation by 1997, but is still in the review process and costs of constructing and operating it continue to rise as well.
“There are questions as you think about scaling up nuclear energy, which we need to do to combat climate change,” Roecker said. “Heading down the road of reprocessing is really kind of a dead-end,” he said. “There needs to be more research done on it, more studies. It’s a science experiment not ready for primetime.”
The lack of a national waste repository has led to renewed interest in reprocessing, Roecker said. But even if the country decides to go through with reprocessing, it will still need a long-term repository, which he said should be the administration’s chief focus instead of reprocessing, he added.
Though reprocessing could be reconsidered in the future, given the current domestic momentum for nuclear power, the United States should focus on building reactors and proven technologies now rather than putting funds towards a “potential dead-end” in fuel reprocessing, Roecker said.