Nuclear waste: DC has ignored a cheaper way to dispose of plutonium — until now Sentinel.com, Douglas Birch & R. Jeffrey Smith The Center for Public Integrity, 7 July 13,
For the past decade, Washington has known how to dispose of excess U.S. plutonium at a cost estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars less than what the Energy Department is spending on a South Carolina factory meant to transform plutonium into fuel for nuclear reactors.
Instead of burning the plutonium, the cheaper alternative mixes it with glass or ceramics and some other materials, so it can be buried deep underground.
The government — until now — has rejected that option. But after spending $3.7 billion on the still-incomplete fuel factory, the Obama administration is giving the immobilization alternative a closer look. And independent scientists who formerly supported the so-called Mixed-Oxide (MOX) plant are now arguing that the alternative, called “immobilization,” seems the wiser choice.
Immobilization “appears to be cheaper and easier to do,” said Matthew Bunn, who was U.S. staff director for a joint U.S.-Russian panel that drafted a blueprint for the huge plutonium disposal project at the request of the White House in 1996.
The fuel factory is at the heart of a U.S.-Russian pact that calls for each nation to dispose of 34 tons of plutonium withdrawn from excess nuclear weapons — a deal that’s been altered so many times that it’s now unclear if the end result will be a world with less plutonium or more.
Meanwhile, the MOX fuel factory is billions of dollars over budget and under new scrutiny by the Obama administration, which has threatened to cancel it.
“I was one of the ones pushing [the project] … I used to be strongly in support of the program, but have gotten fed up with the sheer cost” of the fuel factory, said Bunn, now a co-director of Harvard University’s Project on Managing the Atom, aimed at reducing the risks posed by nuclear explosive materials.
At the factory, located on the Savannah River government reservation near Aiken, S.C., the plutonium is supposed to be mixed in a powder with another radioactive oxide, and then compressed into pellets to be stacked in fuel rods for nuclear reactors.
Under the immobilization option, plutonium would instead be ground up and encased in ceramic material shaped like a hockey puck, before being stacked in a can. The cans could be placed in a larger canister filled with molten glass contaminated by intensely radioactive nuclear waste — deadly enough to stop any thief or intruder. It would then be stored in subterranean vaults or inserted into 3-mile-deep boreholes, probably in a western state.
Under the original deal with Russia, the United States planned to immobilize a little over a quarter of the 34 tons of plutonium and convert the remainder into MOX fuel. In 2002, however, the administration of President George W. Bush canceled the immobilization option, arguing it lacked the funds to pursue both. Subsequently, Energy Department scientists discovered that some of the plutonium could not easily be converted into reactor fuel, forcing them to come up with an immobilization scheme for at least 4 metric tons of plutonium now at Savannah River.
The mystery glue
That requirement inspired the scientists to invent a mysterious substance that can be mixed with plutonium, which they have called “stardust.”
James Giusti, a DOE spokesman at the Savannah River site, said the precise composition of “stardust” is classified, but he confirmed that it’s not radioactive, which greatly eases handling of the wastes. When the “stardust” is blended with small amounts of plutonium, he said, it is hard to separate the two materials — and that’s crucial. “The compound makes it extremely difficult if not impossible to recover the plutonium unless you have a special chemical separation facility,” he said.
On a minute scale, this immobilization process has been shown to work. About 22 pounds of weapons plutonium have been mixed with “stardust,” placed in drums and stored at the bottom of a 2,150-foot-deep, man-made cavern east of Carlsbad, N.M., according to DOE officials. The remote, $1 billion government facility there was carved out of salt beds to be a repository for materials contaminated with highly radioactive wastes left over from U.S. weapons work, and in theory it could be expanded to hold larger quantities of immobilized plutonium.
Kenneth Bromberg, a former DOE official, said he has seen studies asserting that immobilization would cost 20 to 30 percent less than building the fuel factory, although he warned that cost estimates are difficult on such complex projects.
A 2002 report to Congress by the National Nuclear Security Administration, the division of the Energy agency overseeing the plutonium disposal effort, stated bluntly that immobilization was cheaper. The study estimated that long-term immobilization and storage of the plutonium — the option now getting a new look — would cost $600 million less than fashioning it into reactor fuel using the MOX plant: $3.2 billion instead of $3.8 billion (those were the prices at the time).
The Bush administration rejected the cheaper approach, however, citing the fact that the Russians disliked immobilization and wanted America to pursue the alternative approach Moscow preferred — namely construction of a factory that would turn the plutonium into reactor fuel.
Moscow said only this method would extract financial value from the plutonium. So the Russians are building a similar factory, in a mountain tunnel complex at the formerly closed city of Zheleznogorsk in central Siberia, and they intend to burn that factory’s MOX fuel in two nuclear “breeder” reactors. Those two reactors are ideal for creating new plutonium — just the opposite of what the original deal was supposed to accomplish, causing many arms control advocates to question the virtue of the arrangement.
The NNSA report, which said that immobilization was a cheaper option, was actually drafted to explain why that path was not selected. It did so by citing Russia’s preference, and by noting — in a politically savvy fashion — that pursuing immobilization would reduce “employment that would have been created in South Carolina.”
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Congress knew from the outset that building the fuel factory was not the cheapest option. “It was a cost that Congress was willing to accept in order to help the Russian MOX program stay on track,” the House Appropriations Energy and Water subcommittee noted in an April 2006 report.
This history has since been garbled a bit by DOE: When asked to explain the choice at a recent congressional hearing, Neile Miller, then the acting head of NNSA, responded that when MOX was chosen “as a way to get agreement with the Russians,” U.S. officials believed the arrangement could be “more cost effective.”http://www.tucsonsentinel.com/nationworld/report/070513_nuclear_waste/nuclear-waste-dc-has-ignored-cheaper-way-dispose-plutonium-until-now/
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