Old idea is back again on nuclear waste

WASHINGTON — Decades ago, scientists and engineers thought it would be easy enough to deal with the radioactive waste from nuclear power plants: sort out and save the small portion that was reusable, and put the rest in a hole in the ground out West.

It did not work out that way. Reprocessing the waste proved to be both expensive and risky: the main material being scavenged, plutonium, is a nuclear bomb fuel.

And that hole in the ground — the proposed Yucca Mountain repository 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas — is years behind schedule, bogged down in politics and environmental disputes.

Same with the nuclear waste storage facility proposed for Utah's Skull Valley in Tooele County — plagued by opposition from politicians and weakened support from its private investors.

Also, even if Yucca opens, it will be far too small for the amount of waste that is being generated.

So last month, Congress voted $50 million for the Energy Department to explore a new kind of reprocessing, one that would reuse a much larger fraction of the waste.

The idea is extremely ambitious. It would require perfecting not only a new method of reprocessing but also a new class of reactors to burn the salvaged material.

Still, proponents said it would have two great advantages: It would mean that Yucca Mountain would be big enough to accommodate the waste that could not be recycled. And it would make Yucca easier to open, because the material still to be buried would generate less heat in the centuries to come.

"Reprocessing, or processing spent fuel before it's put in the repository, is a very good way to buy time," said Roger W. Gale, a former Energy Department official who is now an electricity consultant. "It's a fail-safe in case we continue to have problems with Yucca Mountain."

Many experts are skeptical that the new strategy, which would involve separating the components of spent fuel and putting the salvaged material in reactors using higher-energy neutrons, will work.

Another former Energy Department official, Robert Alvarez, noted that the idea of reprocessing had been around for at least 40 years, each time with a different rationale.

"Once, it was part of breeder program," Alvarez said, referring to a scheme to use reactors to make more nuclear fuel than the reactor consumed. "Then it became a proliferation thing," with supporters reasoning that such a system would safely consume materials that could be used for a bomb.