There's buzz in the enviro-blog-o-sphere about tonight's State of the Union address, ranging from whether Bush will admit that human-spewed CO2 is changing the climate (unlikely -- but my blog-buddy Kit Stolz over at A Change in the Wind has taken a poll) to how alternative his energy ideas will be to whether he'll endorse the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel as a solution to the nuclear-power waste crisis. The Union of Concerned Scientists is especially in a lather about this one, and has sent out a press release advising listeners to look for embedded clues:
For instance, if Bush uses the term "renewable" nuclear energy or "recycling," he is likely referring to reprocessing spent fuel to extract the plutonium for eventual use as new reactor fuel. Phrases such as "new, safer technologies" and "solving the nuclear waste problem" also refer to reprocessing but are disingenuous; new reprocessing technologies would still make weapon-usable materials accessible to terrorists and nations, and would change the form and increase the volume of nuclear waste, thereby kicking the waste problem down the road.
It's the new SOTU drinking game challenge -- knock one back every time you think "Hey, what'd he mean by that?" As a general rule, I'm against reprocessing for the reasons John McPhee and UCS' Dave Lochbaum are: Proliferation and pollution. But I'm open to discussion on that one.
On another note, I did a segment of a Bay Area radio show this morning, Your Call Radio, with the always inspiring John Sellars of the Ruckus Society (I profiled him years ago, here) and Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. We talked about so-called "eco-terror" threat, the many indictments of the last month and the motiviations the FBI has to exaggerate the domestic "terror" threat coming from animal rights and fringe environmental groups. I was impressed with the high-minded tone of the discussion, the host and the callers. It was a good live media experience (and I've had some disasters). You can listen here.
And on that note: Read this post over at Gristmill about the recently indicted alleged ecoterrorists saboteurs and their "unremarkable lives." Evidently Chelsea Gerlach wrote in her yearbook that her generation was born to save the earth. Lock her up!
(Cartoon source: Funny Times)
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Modern reprocessing doesn't extract the plutonium. It removes the fission products.
No reprocessing technology can produce weapons-grade material unless the material was already weapons-grade (no isotope separation is involved). For example, the RBMK was designed to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Reprocessing of spent RBMK fuel would produce weapons-grade materials. However, reprocessing fuel from Russia's PWRs would produce a mixture of plutonium isotopes that doesn't work in bombs. So the RBMK is the proliferation risk, not the reprocessing.
Posted on February 1, 2006 6:02 PM by Stewart Peterson
But the "fission products" are uranium and plutonium, and while it's true some reprocessing methods are meant to be proliferation resistant, no one really thinks they are, or we'd be giving Iran thumbs up with a big pat on the bat.
Cheryl Rofer over at WhirledView has an excellent post up on this. Check it out:
http://whirledview.typepad.com/whirledview/2006/01/nuclear_reproce.html
Posted on February 1, 2006 11:02 PM by Judith Lewis
Fission products are the lighter elements produced when an atom splits. Modern reprocessing--electrorefining and pyroprocessing--separates these light elements from the heavier, usable fuels.
Reprocessing has never allowed anyone to make a bomb. It can't, because it doesn't separate isotopes of the same elements. The enrichment level of uranium-235/238 and purity level of plutonium-239/240/241 are the same going out as coming in.
The debate over Iran is not whether they should have reprocessing, but enrichment. The difference? Enrichment is isotope separation.
As for the link, the only 'engineering fixes' that a proliferator could get through to make a bomb are those involved in making a bomb. Reprocessing separates fission products from spent fuel. Older versions (PUREX) separate plutonium from uranium. No version, however, separates plutonium-239, uranium-235, and uranium-233, which work in bombs, to the exclusion of plutonium-240, plutonium-241, and uranium-238, which don't. Reprocessing can't add any proliferation problems that weren't already there.
Posted on February 2, 2006 10:02 PM by Stewart Peterson
I think it's necessary, in correcting Peterson's main misstatement above (but noting that nothing he said was really misleading), to distinguish reprocessing of uranium that has resided a short time in a reactor -- low "burnup" -- from reprocessing of spent power reactor fuel, which naturally is left in until it has yielded most or all the energy it can, i.e. until its burnup is high. The former kind yielded the high-grade plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb.
Some clever people are eager to point out that relatively junky plutonium separated from high-burnup fuel still can, in theory, be made to fission explosively. I see nothing wrong with that theory but would point out that no known proliferator has ever shown any interest.
If the ease of building a clandestine low-burnup reactor specifically to make Nagasaki-style bombs is represented by a shelf at head height, those putatively anti-proliferation measures that require power reactor operators to put reactor-grade plutonium on ever higher shelves are not genuinely aimed at that goal once the shelves are above standing-on-tiptoe fingertip height.
Indeed, continuing the analogy, the shelf height beyond which proliferation concerns become insincere or misinformed may be shoulder height, standing flatfooted, given the inferiority from a bomb-maker's point of view of power-reactor-grade plutonium. This inferiority is attested by the fact that when the US and USSR each had their choice of grades of plutonium, and were building bombs as fast as they could, they still didn't use power-reactor-grade.
So spent fuel reprocessing has never much interested bomb-makers. Interestingly, it also has never interested power reactor operators. Uranium prospectors find them new deposits for 0.7 cents per thermal barrel-of-oil-equivalent, and miners raise that BOE for less than 25 cents, so a $10 reprocessing bill for an additional BOE of heat from remade fuel, isn't interesting and won't be any time in the years XYYY, where 'X' ranges from 2 to 9 and 'Y' is any digit.
(A. P. Smith may not know it, but in saying breeder reactors, which depend on reprocessing, are necessary if nuclear is to be a "long term" solution, he means longer term than that.)
--- Graham Cowan, former hydrogen fanBoron: fire without monoxide
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