CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE

CARNEGIE INTERNATIONAL NONPROLIFERATION CONFERENCE

9:00 – 10:30 A.M. PART 2: THE U.S. AND THE FUTURE OF REPROCESSING

CHAIR: JOSÉ GOLDEMBERG, UNIVERSITY OF SAO PAULO

TATSUJIRO SUZUKI,

UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO

FRANK VON HIPPEL, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

WILLIAM WALKER,

UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS

TUESDAY, JUNE 26, 2007 RONALD REAGAN BUILDING

AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE CENTER MERIDIAN D-E

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Transcript by: Federal News Service

Washington, D.C.

JOSÉ GOLDEMBERG: I am José Goldemberg from Brazil. And we are here for a workshop on the U.S. and the future of reprocessing. But before we start, let me tell you a few things about the International Panel on Fissile Materials which was founded January 2006 with a five-year grant from the MacArthur Foundation. The members of the panel come from 15 countries – six weapons states, nine non-weapons states – and they include former high level officials, ambassadors, academics, mostly with technical background. A larger group contributes to reports, including retired senior IAEA experts research and administrative support is provided by Princeton University’s program on science and global security. The reports that have been published thus far are here. There is an annual report for 2006. Then there are topical reports on a number of issues.

Now, the members, just to give an idea of who we are. Frank von Hippel and I are co-chairs of this panel and there are people from China, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States. It’s truly international in character. And there are a number of forthcoming reports. You can find the IPFM reports on the web, at this address: www.fissilematerials.org

The panel we have there today is on the U.S. and the future of reprocessing, in

which we’ll have William Walker from England, University of St. Andrews, then Tatsujiro Suzuki from University of Tokyo, and Frank von Hippel from Princeton.

Before we get started, let me make two or three points here because this will be

my best opportunity to make these points. The main question facing governments and utilities in the nuclear area today is how to manage spent fuel, a question given fresh relevance by the plans to expand nuclear power in various parts of the world. The spread of enrichment plants in many countries also receives concern. Reprocessing is needed only if large nuclear programs are contemplated which, in my view, is not a given. As I mention, I come from Brazil which is a large developing country and a large nuclear “renaissance” will only happen if developing countries like Brazil embrace that solution.

And large nuclear programs means going from today’s 350 gigawatts to 1,000 or

1,500 gigawatts. It’s not a given that that’s going to happen. And we were just exposed to a presentation by the undersecretary of Energy of the United States which argued that a thousand gigawatts will be very good. And one of the main reasons for that being good is that it will reduce carbon emissions. Let me point out that a thousand gigawatts will avoid the emission of 1.5 gigatons of carbon. The total amount of gigatons being emitted is seven gigatons and 1.5 gigatons is what’s being emitted today by deforestation, which is absurd from any viewpoint because it affects biodiversity and all other things.

So if you’re really serious about cutting carbon emissions, you should look into

reducing deforestation immediately. And so that argument for nuclear is not such a

strong one. In any case, if a large renaissance happens, a strong system of safeguards, physical protection, and an international approach in enrichment and reprocessing might be needed to avoid uncontrolled proliferation.

This panel was established to explore the need for agreements and treaties to

guide behavior and how to do it. We invited the representative of AREVA, which I imagine is here. Dorothy Davidson, is she here? Yes. I will make sure that you will be able to intervene later on. Okay, so these are then the reasons why we are assembled here. And without much further ado, I will ask then William Walker to make the first presentation on the U.K. and nuclear reprocessing.

WILLIAM WALKER: I’m very grateful for the invitation to come to this

conference and to speak here. You will have all heard yesterday at lunch time Mrs. Beckett’s statement on U.K. nuclear weapon policy and essentially what she was saying was an expression of continuity in U.K. policy. And I would say that stretching back 50 years, there have been three elements to British nuclear weapon policy. One is the maintenance of an effective, credible minimum deterrent; a strong commitment to arms control, nonproliferation, disarmament; and maintaining a close relationship with the United States, partly to sustain the nuclear deterrent, but also to gain influence over U.S. policy and strategy.

On the fuel cycle policy, though, after nearly 50 years of commitment to

reprocessing, originally for military purposes and then for commercial and energy security purposes, suddenly in the last five years, that has been abandoned, and – as my title implies – the British government, in fact, is organizing a retreat from reprocessing. And this, I have to say, puts it to somewhat at odds with the French and the Japanese policies on reprocessing and also from what we were hearing earlier on at least what the American government’s intention is in regard to the future development of reprocessing. So the question I want to ask really is what is happening in U.K. and why, when at least some states seem to be moving in the other direction, the U.K. having had a very big long history of involvement in reprocessing is actually moving out of it?

These are two statements that are in the U.K. government white paper on the

future of nuclear power in the U.K. A white paper in the British system is simply a statement of policy that is brought before Parliament. And this is a paper from earlier this year; the first part of it is a recognition that nuclear power does have an important contribution to make to the future energy supply of the U.K., and to meet the needs of low carbon electricity production and energy security. So there’s no question of the British government moving away from nuclear power. On the other hand, it is stating quite clearly now that for any future nuclear power stations that might be built, the spent fuel coming from them will not be reprocessed.

I think there are two elements to this. One is that a recognition by government

that to make nuclear power economic in U.K., you cannot combine an economic future for nuclear power with a commitment to reprocessing. That’s the result of the long kind of experience in the U.K. And the particular thing is that the government wants the

rejuvenation of nuclear power in U.K. predominantly be funded by the private sector. If that is going to happen, then they can’t go on with reprocessing. The final thing has more to do with public acceptance. There again they’re not going to be able to rejuvenate nuclear power in U.K. while the highly controversial issue of reprocessing is kept alive.

Okay, very briefly, the U.K.’s reprocessing facilities: you have the B-205 plant

that has been dealing Magnox fuel since the late 1960s and that’s due to close in 2012 when all the Magnox reactors themselves have been closed down. And then you have the THORP reprocessing plant which was constructed in the 1980s, came into operation in the 1990s, and has been reprocessing foreign light water reactor fuel from Europe and Japan and domestic advanced gas cool reactor fuel. The planned closure for this plant is 2011, but its future is very much in doubt because its operation was suspended in 2005 after an accident in an accountancy tank. When and whether the plant will ever come back on stream is still an open question.

Just another thing to note is that all the spent fuels coming from the Sizewell

reactor which is the one light water reactor in the U.K., has not been reprocessed. When this reactor was built, a very large spent fuel storage capacity was built on site to avoid the need for reprocessing this fuel. So in fact, all the light water reactor spent fuel has been stored unreprocessed and is going to be disposed of in that fashion in due course.

The performance of THORP and the Sellafield MOX plant, which as constructed

to fabricate MOX fuel from recovered plutonium particularly so that it could be sent back to Japan. The THORP design capacity, you’ll see is 1,200 tons of heavy metal per year. The throughput actually has averaged 440, so not really up to what was expected originally. And the MOX plant has been, I have to say, a bit of a disaster. During the last five years since it was supposed to come into operation, it has actually only produced I think four tons of MOX. Thus several hundred millions of pounds are being spent on a technology that really so far has not succeeded. And again, a great deal of effort is being put into it by French and other engineers – (chuckles) – to try to make the horrible thing work. But they’re struggling with that.

Next thing to say is that so far none of the foreign plutonium and waste coming

from THORP have been returned to the country of origin, so it’s just staying in the U.K. when in fact there is this intention to send it back. And as yet, there are no MOX fuel-fabrication contracts with Japanese utilities. So the whole thing is rather stymied and stuck at the moment.

The results of the U.K.’s engagement reprocessing. First of all, we have the

largest stock of civil separated plutonium in the world: 105 tons, I think it is at the end of 2005, of which 26.5 tons are foreign plutonium. There’s been no domestic recycling of plutonium in the U.K. There’s no disposition plan currently, so we simply have a huge stock of separated plutonium in store. And I would say it’s now generally recognized in government that, in fact, reprocessing has actually exacerbated the U.K.’s nuclear waste problem. First of all, it’s created multiple waste streams; it’s created a certain amount of pollution of the seas and the coastlines around the U.K., and indeed around Ireland and

into the Baltic areas, and, even now, 50 years after all this began, there’s no agreed disposal sites for high activity wastes in the U.K. And by the way, this term high activity waste in the U.K. is being used now to cover both high level waste and intermediate level waste. And there are very heavy costs of clean up and decommissioning, that I’m just coming to.

And lastly, I think there’s a feeling that reprocessing really has damaged the

prestige of the nuclear industry in the U.K. So over the last five years, there has been a policy reversal, a kind of phased withdrawal from reprocessing by, as I say, within the next five or so years, although there’s now uncertainty about THORP.

Why has this happened? Well, I think the key thing that happened was that the

electricity supply industry was privatized and suddenly it became very, very sensitive to costs. And one of its major costs was in the back end of the fuel cycle. Secondly was the recognition by the utilities that plutonium fuels were always uncompetitive with uranium fuels. And you had this accumulation of unwanted plutonium stocks – there’s masses of plutonium in the U.K., but in fact the utilities simply don’t want to use it for a whole variety of reasons. Third thing was that within government and in the wider society, there was a disillusion with reprocessing and with this company, British Nuclear and Fuels, which has been advocating reprocessing so strongly over so many years and yet it seemed to just bring grief. And as I said, earlier there was this government desire to relaunch nuclear power, but to do it in the most pragmatic, simple, straightforward means possible.

And I think lastly was the post-9/11 worries about sabotage – terrorist sabotage –

and particularly the enormous quantity of untreated liquid high-level wastes at Sellafield. There was a great worry that this presented a threat and really had to be dealt with in a serious way. So the conclusion of both the government and the industry was first of all, you have to focus on decommissioning waste treatment and disposal and deal with the nuclear legacies and secondly you have to adopt the simplest, most reliable fuel cycle if there was ever going to be a relaunch of nuclear power in the U.K.

And so in 2005, the government established through parliamentary act the

Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, NDA, to ensure the safe, accelerated and affordable clean up of the U.K.’s nuclear legacy. The NDA took over all the nuclear sites including Sellafield and British Nuclear Fuel was essentially dethroned and it became simply a government contractor. The U.K.’s waste legacy – this is from the past 50 years of mainly civil nuclear activity arising from abandoned fast reactors, power reactors, reprocessing and fuel fabrication facilities, and a huge high volume of variety of wastes. The NDA’s – the government’s – own current cost estimate excluding plutonium disposition is that all of this is going to cost over – I forget exactly what time period it is – I think its $120 billion at $1.95 per pound undiscounted and $68 billion discounted. Sellafield accounts for about 63 percent of this. This, as you see, translates to a $8.2 billion legacy cost per gigawatt of installed capacity, including fast reactors and every other type of power reactor built in the U.K.

This is an enormous cost that has arisen out of the past 50 years of investment in the British nuclear fuel cycle. And where this is really landing is mainly with the taxpayer and the government. The Treasury is having to meet this cost at a rate of between $2 (billion) and $3 billion annually into the indefinite future. And naturally, they’re very unhappy with this.

Reasons for the policy failures in the U.K. I think first of all you go back to these

wildly unrealistic forecasts of future needs and benefits. And if you go back to the 1970s, to the Windscale Inquiry in 1977, the argument was that we need enough plutonium for at least eight fast breeder reactors by the end of the century and many more after that, and the Magnox program can’t supply that and therefore you have to have THORP, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Generally, looking back into these forecasts were simply wildly unrealistic, and that’s one of the source of the problems.

The second is the monopoly power of the British Nuclear Fuels, attached to a

spent fuel receptor site so that reprocessing became the quid pro quo for utilities transferring spent fuel from their reactor sites a central site. And there’s been a history of industrial and political mismanagement, and I would say over this 50 year period, you have this kind of embedded commitment, political, contractual, infrastructural, legal, local employment and so on. And this phenomenon of lock-in technological entrapment, group-think, whatever you’d like to call it, is very easy to get big organizations trapped in things and to find it extraordinarily difficult to get out of it until things really reach a certain pitch where you just have to get out of it.

I’ve spent, unfortunately, quite a lot of my time studying reprocessing programs

around the world, and it seems to me that there are some intrinsic problems with reprocessing and recycling, which isn’t to suggest, in fact, that the alternatives to it are truly wonderful themselves, but there are these intrinsic problems.

And the first is that everywhere it happens it increases the costs, risks, and

complexity of spent fuel management. Secondly, you have a problem of coordination, technical, commercial, political coordination. The licensing process is of (?) utilities behavior, recycling, et cetera, et cetera. You just have endless problems of coordination. In the economist-speak, you would say in fact it has very high transaction costs.

Thirdly, you have this nexus of relations between the state and industry, very

close relations, and they become, in a sense, agents of each other, and a true resistance to effective public accountability and control, and in fact, to market forces. Fourthly is this policy inflexibility, weight of commitments, and a tendency to act like cuckoos in the nest to try and kill all alternatives to try and ensure survival.

Fifthly, of course, is the well-known problem of linkage to nuclear proliferation

and troubles about nuclear weapons, and lastly, I just mention, the cost and difficulty of safeguarding complex flows in large bulk processes and the problems for the agency, the IAEA, Euratom and other safeguards agencies in dealing with these kinds of technologies. So thank you very much. (Applause.)

MR. GOLDEMBERG: Thank you – (unintelligible). We’ll go to the next

presentation, by Tatsujiro Suzuki from the University of Tokyo on “Japan Spent Fuel and Plutonium Management.”

TATSUJIRO SUZUKI: Thank you. Thank you, Chairman. Thank you for

everybody. It is my honor to be here today to present Japan’s spent fuel and plutonium management issues, based on the work done for IPFM, and before I start presentation, I would like to acknowledge that most of the work done is actually by Dr. Katsuta, who is sitting right here. So if you have any detailed questions, he would be able to answer. And also, today I am speaking in a personal capacity, not representing any organization I belong to. Okay.

The main messages of my talk are threefold. The first, the plutonium challenge in

Japan is basically a spent fuel management challenge, and it’s not a purely technical thing. It’s a very complicated sociopolitical issues. And second, the Japanese plutonium stockpile is already large, and if the Rokkasho reprocessing plant starts full-scale operation, this stockpile will likely grow from its current 40 tons or so to probably double that, 80 tons or so, which is a concern.

The third, in order to minimize this plutonium stockpile, we believe it is feasible

to defer operation of the Rokkasho reprocessing plant by securing spent fuel storage in Japan. Technically, also politically, I believe, it is feasible. So those are the three messages of our report.

All right, the first, Japan’s plutonium programs is basically recycling plutonium

and then going to the breeder reactor. This is basically the core of the Japanese policy since 1950s and has been maintained. Because of this reprocessing policy, Japan has already 37.8 tons of plutonium, most of it at reprocessing plants in France and the U.K. and 5.9 tons of plutonium in Japan.

Japan Nuclear Fuel Limited, which is a reprocessing company that is a subsidiary

of Japan’s utilities, is going to start full-scale operation on Rokkasho reprocessing plant. It has started the active testing program, which means actually reprocessing spent fuel already. If this Rokkasho plants operates at capacity, eight tons of plutonium can be recovered annually.

Japanese utilities plan to recycle all this plutonium into the existing light-water

reactors because Japan’s fast reactor program is still immature. But unfortunately, as of today, no single light-water power reactor has been loaded with plutonium-containing fuel so the plutonium has been accumulating.

This is the overview of Rokkasho. Rokkasho village is at the northern part of

Japan, which was once called the Siberia of Japan. But because of this huge industrial complex, this project has brought many jobs and income to the area. The plant has started active testing, as I said, and as of today, roughly 400 tons of spent fuel has been

reprocessed for testing processes, and plutonium has been recovered already. So the plant has been already contaminated and the commissioning costs will have to be borne by us, basically.

This complicated chart shows why Japanese utilities need to reprocess. The right

hand side shows at which year the reactor pool will be filled up. If a pool fills up with spent fuel, the reactor has to shut down. So it is crucial for utilities to ship this spent fuel off to somewhere. This is the main reason why Japanese utilities need to continue the reprocessing.

If you look at these numbers, the pools at Fukushima II and other plants would

already be filled up. But they have already shipped some spent fuel to the Rokkasho processing plant. As of May 2007, more than 2,000 tons of spent fuel had been shipped to Rokkasho. So this is why it was very crucial for utilities to have a reprocessing plant to ship spent fuel to.

But technically speaking, you don’t have to ship spent fuel to the Rokkasho

processing plant. Technically, you could have a dry cask storage facility on site. And actually, Fukushima I has a small dry cask storage on site, but no other local site has allowed utility companies to buy dry cask storage, so they have to ship somewhere. One place is the Rokkasho reprocessing plant. Another place since the Japanese government changed its policy to allow so-called away-from-reactor storage is an interim storage facility at Mutsu, which is close to Rokkasho. It will eventually have a capacity of 5,000 tons of heavy metal in spent fuel, and it is supposed to open in 2010. Now, if you look at the cost of the Rokkasho reprocessing plant, its capital cost is $18 billion, but the Mutsu storage facility only costs $.8 (?) billion.

Reprocessing is very expensive, as William said, and this is the estimate of the

Japanese Rokkasho reprocessing plant 40-year lifetime cost done by the government. The total for 40 years is more than $130 billion, including high-level waste storage and disposal and MOX fuel fabrication. Under the liberalized energy market, there is no guarantee for the utilities to recover these costs. They asked for help, and the government agreed because this is a government policy, so they created a so-called reprocessing fund to collect the charges from all existing customers to finance this huge project.

In order to rationalize those policies, Japan’s Atomic Energy Commission needs

to determine that the existing policy is appropriate, so for the first time in history, Japan’s Atomic Energy Commission compared the recycling options with direct disposal of spent fuel. There are four scenarios. Scenario one is existing, keep going, including building a second reprocessing plant. The second one is partial reprocessing. After Rokkasho, they would shift to direct spent-fuel disposal.

Scenario three is cancel Rokkasho and go to direct spent fuel disposal, and

scenario four is cancel Rokkasho but keep the spent fuel in the long-term storage. And if you look at the first row, even the government estimate says that the reprocessing option

more expensive than the direct disposal or storage option. But if Rokkasho is canceled, they assume that there’s no place for spent fuel to go, so you have to shut down the nuclear reactors. All nuclear power plants will be shut down. Then you have to have replacement power so the cost for the replacement fossil-fueled power plants should be added. So that’s the second column. (Laughter.)

MR. : It’s a row, it’s a row. MR. SUZUKI: Second row, okay. So if you add those costs, the recycling option

is cheaper than the non-recycling option, and based on those estimates, the government allowed utilities to start up the Rokkasho reprocessing plant and also allowed the government to establish a reprocessing fund. So that’s what happened.

But our analysis suggests that, even if Rokkasho doesn’t operate, Japan has

enough spent fuel storage, probably up to the 2020s. After that, you have to build more interim storage. By 2050, you probably need five or six Mutsu-sized facilities, but the total cost is probably only $8 billion or so, which is still very cheap compared to the reprocessing option.

This is the grand picture, but in reality it’s much more complicated. First of all,

Japan’s spent fuel storage scheme is not flexible, so some of the utilities would face shortages early. No transfer of spent fuel is allowed between power plant sites. So even if there is space available somewhere else, once a particular power plant faces a shortage, it has to shut down. So that’s one thing.

Even Rokkasho’s capacity for spent fuel storage is not really flexible. And the

Mutsu, interim storage facility is owned by Tokyo Electric Power and Japan Atomic Power and not assigned to other utility companies. So the numbers suggest that some of the utilities – particularly those with boiling water reactors – may face shortages of storage space in the mid-2010s. So this is one reason that some of the utilities do need the Rokkasho reprocessing plant.

In addition, even for the storage at the Rokkasho plant at Mutsu, the governor and

the mayors of the towns will only accept spent fuel storage if reprocessing continues. So the utilities are looking for off-site storage space, but in order to secure the storage space, they have to continue the reprocessing.

With regard to Japan’s separated plutonium, however, only a small amount of the

plutonium has been recycled. If you look at this chart, this is 2004, of a total of 160 tons of plutonium is owned by Japan almost 60 percent of plutonium is still in spent fuel at the power plants. The second column is actually how much plutonium has been separated. So roughly 30 percent of the plutonium has been separated, in total. The lightest column, right-hand column, is how much plutonium has actually been fabricated into fuel. Only five tons of plutonium in the last 30 years has been fabricated into fuel, which means less than four percent of the total plutonium. But once Rokkasho is started, annually eight

tons of plutonium will be separated. So it’s very hard for Japan’s utilities to recycle all of this plutonium.

So in the future, what’s going to happen? The top solid line shows plutonium

separation and the shaded part is consumption by the recycling program under the plan of the utilities and the government. This would be a full-scale recycling program – which is roughly 18 reactors burning plutonium fuel. Option A would be to recycle first plutonium from Europe. In this case, Japan’s domestic plutonium stockpile would grow to 70 tons. The second option is to burn domestic plutonium first. In this case, the domestic stockpile of separated plutonium would only reach to 37 tons, but 40 tons of plutonium would remain in Europe. The third option would be to defer the operation of the Rokkasho plant. Then you could burn plutonium very quickly. It takes about 10 years to consume all of Japan’s existing separated plutonium.

So this is the status of the MOX programs in Japan. The problem is that in

addition to the technical safety requirements, the Japanese utilities have to negotiate with the local governments to get their consent for recycling plutonium. The Tokyo and Kansai electric power companies did not receive all the consents, but then there were scandals and accidents, so the local governors said no recycling. So even if you get the consents, if something happens, the consents can be cancelled. It’s a long, long process to negotiate with the local government. At this point Kyusyuand Shikoku Electric could be the first utilities to recycle plutonium, but the earliest date is 2010 and that is for plutonium coming from Europe. So for plutonium coming out of Rokkasho, the earliest date is probably 2012. So this is the reality for Japan’s recycling programs.

So, my conclusion is that even though there is, in principle, sufficient spent-fuel

storage capacity in Japan until the 2020s, it is insufficient because of the inflexibility of spent-fuel management within Japan, which his mostly a social and political problem. Some of the utilities may face shortage before 2010, but, by sharing storage capacities, we believe that the process could be postponed for probably another decade or so. On the other hand, if Rokkasho starts operating, Japan’s plutonium stockpile would grow, probably by 2010 to 70 tons or so, even if we have a full-scale recycling program.

So our conclusion is deferring Rokkasho operations at least another decade or so

could help to minimize the plutonium stockpile and also to minimize international concern. And we believe that it’s possible technically and politically. So that’s my conclusion. Thank you very much.

(Applause.) MR. GOLDEMBERG: Thank you. We’ll go down to our last presentation by

Frank von Hippel of Princeton University. MR. VON HIPPEL: The talk you just heard is a report written by Tadahiro

Katsuta and Tatsujiru Suzuki. That is IPFM research report number two. The talk that you are going to hear from me is also based on an IPFM report, number three report on

the table. There are two other reports there. The other red report there is on the U.S.-India deal, and the green report is our first annual overview of the global fissile material situation. So you’re welcome to take those, and you can also find our reports on the website fissilematerials.org.

We’ve talked about the U.K. situation, about the Japanese situation, and now

about the proposal to replicate a variant of this situation in the U.S. In the U.S. the situation has been driven by the fact that Yucca Mountain which is supposed to be the destination of U.S. spent fuel, has been delayed by at least 20 years. It was supposed to start accepting delivery of spent fuel in 1998, so what is happening is that the spent fuel polls at the reactors have been or are being filled up, just as in Japan. But in the U.S., we have a somewhat more forgiving system and dry cask storage is being built on the reactor sites. This picture shows a full reactor lifetime discharge of spent fuel in dry cask storage. All the spent fuel from the Maine Yankee plant is stored in these dry casks. The plant is now shut down. Each cask contains about 10 tons of spent fuel – about half of an annual output of a gigawatt, i.e. a million kilowatt-scale reactor.

But the utilities would like to have this spent fuel removed, and so in the absence

of Yucca Mountain in the near term, the Department of Energy has proposed an alternative destination, a reprocessing plant. This is a diagram showing what would happen to the spent fuel in the DOE’s proposal. On the top is the fuel cycle we have now in the U.S. Low-enriched uranium fuel is used in reactors and then discharged and stored on site. Below the line is what the Department of Energy proposes to add. A reprocessing plant and depending on their conversion ratio, 40 to 75 gigawatts of sodium-cooler fast nuclear reactors. These reactors would be required to turn into fission products all the plutonium and the so-called minor transuranics – neptunium, americium and curium – at the rate that they are discharged in spent fuel from our water-cooled reactors.

Now what the DOE proposes as a first stage is to build a full-scale reprocessing

plant able to keep up with the discharges of spent fuel from U.S. light water reactors, but to build only one demonstration sodium cooled burner reactor. So the result will be that in fact more than 95 percent of the transuranics would accumulate on the reprocessing plant site, and we would have a situation like the U.K. The mission to move the spent fuels to a central site would have been accomplished, but a huge cost and we would have converted the spent fuel into forms which would be much more costly to dispose. And also the weapons-usable components of the material like the plutonium and the other transuranics would be much more accessible.

Now AREVA, which has quite a bit of influence with the Department of Energy,

proposes that we do something much simpler. Here, again we have the current U.S. fuel cycle , but AREVA says okay, reprocess it, make it into fuel, but recycle it as AREVA does in France – back into the existing light water reactors. However, France recycles only once, and about 70 percent of the recycled plutonium remains in the spent fuel which is shipped back to the reprocessing plant and then stored. So again, France has succeeded in moving the spent fuel from the reactor sites to a centralized place, and it’s

storing it, again, in spent fuel. The French government’s estimate is that it costs about twice as much as if the spent fuel had just been left unreprocessed.

Now why does reprocessing cost so much more than storage? Well you saw how

simple the dry cask storage technology is. Here’s a picture of part of France’s La Hague reprocessing plant. By AREVA’s accounting it cost $20 billion to build – overnight cost without interest during construction – and costs about a billion dollars a year to operate. This is to be compared with the about the $0.3 billion a year cost that’s required to buy dry cask storage in the U.S. for the 2,000 tons of spent fuel that we discharge annually and to watch over it.

Now the problem is that the world right now has the problem of too much

separated plutonium. This shows that the world has about 500 tons of separated plutonium. About half of that was produced during the Cold War by the U.S. and Russia, The other half was mostly separated by France and the U.K. in their civilian reprocessing plants. It’s just accumulated in the U.K. and France is recycling it but it has quite a large backlog.

The plant that the Department of Energy proposes to build would, if it was

keeping up with the U.S. spent fuel discharges, separate out between 20 and 30 tons of plutonium a year, so over a 20-year period it would double the total world accumulation of separated plutonium. The plutonium might be mixed with the other transuranics, but it turns out it that doesn’t make much difference. Another part of the Department of Energy has declared excess about half of the U.S. separated plutonium, and has a program with a very rapidly rising cost – currently estimated at about 15 billion dollars – to dispose of that plutonium. That would get rid of the equivalent of only two years’ output of the proposed reprocessing plant. What we need now is to reduce the global stockpile of separated plutonium, not increase it.

Now why is separated plutonium of greater concern if it’s separated rather than

left in the spent fuel? These two pictures illustrate the reason. This is a picture from a visit I took to Russia’s reprocessing plant in 1994. It shows a worker routinely handling cans of separated plutonium. This can holds two-and-a-half kilograms of plutonium in oxide form. When I visited their storage facility, it contained 12,000 such cans in a building that was protected basically by a padlock and one very young conscript. Three of these cans would be enough to make a Nagasaki bomb.

By contrast, five kilograms of plutonium in a 500-kilo spent fuel assembly is

diluted by 100 times as much other stuff but, more importantly, is mixed with fission products that emit a very intense gamma radiation field. Fifty years after discharge, you would still get a lethal dose from this fuel assembly at a meter. So if you want to transport even one fuel assembly, you need a 20-ton cask. If you want to extract the plutonium, you need to do it remotely behind heavy shielding. So it’s self-protected in contrast with the separated plutonium.

Before 1974, the U.S. promoted reprocessing worldwide and assisting other countries in acquiring reprocessing technology. One of those countries was India. After India used the first plutonium it separated with our assistance to make a nuclear explosion in 1974, the U.S. reconsidered this policy. It looked at the economics and concluded that plutonium recycle wasn’t economic and adopted a policy that “we don’t reprocess, you don’t need to either.” It’s been very successful. It’s been a very successful policy.

Sometimes the Department of Energy says, “well, we have to reprocess because

the rest of the world reprocesses, and if we’re going to have leadership, we have to do what the rest of the world is doing.” But in fact, this is what has happened. Since the U.S. abandoned reprocessing, all these other countries have abandoned reprocessing about half of the global nuclear capacity. These other countries never reprocessed, although some of them actually had an interest in reprocessing – and we later learned in connection with the ideas of developing a nuclear weapons option.

These are the countries which still reprocess today: France, U.K. and Russia are

the countries which have been reprocessing for other countries – providing reprocessing services for other countries. They have basically lost all of their customers except for the Netherlands which has a one-half sized nuclear power plant which has a continuing long-term reprocessing contract with France. Even the reprocessing countries don’t reprocess all their spent fuel. Russia only reprocesses about 10 percent.

So it’s not just U.S. policy – it’s really the invisible hand of economics that has

discouraged reprocessing worldwide. So the question is what’s the matter with interim on-site dry cask storage, which

is the situation we have today? From the point of view of safety, at an operating nuclear power plant, the dry cask

storage of spent fuel is, by orders of magnitude, less of a risk than the fuel in the reactors and the pool storage. So you don’t diminish the risk at an operating nuclear power reactor by removing the dry cask fuel. And now that they’ve seen that the alternative is reprocessing, the anti-nuclear groups who used to demand that the reactor operators either show that they have a solution for their spent fuel or shut down, say, “we would rather keep the spent fuel on the sites.” They would like to have the storage hardened, maybe put up berms so people can’t shoot anti-tank missiles at the casks.

All U.S. nuclear power plant sites can accommodate spent fuel even if the

operating licenses of the reactors are extended to 60 years. So there is no reason to panic, and I considered GNEP a panic solution much worse than the problem of not being able to remove spent fuel from the reactor sites.

So in conclusion, reprocessing exchanges interim on-site storage of self-

protecting spent fuel for interim stockpiling of material which is easily transportable and from which plutonium could easily be separated if it isn’t actually separated plutonium itself. Reprocessing and plutonium recycle costs two times as much as on-site storage –

if you want to do it French-style by turning it into centrally stored spent MOX fuel – or 10 times if you want to do it the Department of Energy style by building these sodium-cooled reactors. And if the U.S. changes its policy and says that reprocessing is an essential requirement for the future of nuclear power then it does provide a cover for other countries which are interested in developing the nuclear weapons option.

Now finally, I’ve added a slide showing that the Congress is becoming skeptical

of the GNEP proposal. These are a few excerpts from the recent House Appropriations Committee report on energy and water development appropriations.

“The aggressive program proposed by the Department of Energy is at best

premature.” “The department has failed to convince the committee – the Appropriations

Committee – that advanced separations technologies coupled with fast reactors is a viable, comprehensive approach to recycling spent fuel.”

“Embarking on a costly process leading to major new construction projects is

unwise, particularly where there’s no urgency.” “And before the department can expect the committee to support funding for a

major new initiative, the department must provide a complete and credible estimate of the lifecycle cost of the program.”

Undersecretary Sell added to this speech this morning promotion of the Reliable

Replacement Warhead Program. That program too has been greeted with similar skepticism by the House Appropriations Committee. Thank you. (Applause.)

MR. GOLDEMBERG: Very good. We have about half an hour for discussions,

and I will recognize people that want to intervene, but please state your name clearly and try to make the questions short and objective. I will start by recognizing the representative of AREVA, Dorothy Davidson.

Q: I just want to make one comment, I guess -- just one comment rather than a

question. One – thank you very much. It was very interesting to hear the different perspectives. I will make one comment, though, that I think it reinforced, and I guess I’ll respond to Dr. von Hippel first on a number of things.

One – I do have some updated numbers on plutonium holdings. The inventory is

actually being worked down in France, so I’d be willing to share those with you. They are publicly available. The other thing I would say though, I think that the different opinion we would hold at AREVA is that based on the BCG report, we believe that you could have a safe, proliferation-resistant and a cost-effective solution for closing the fuel cycle.

The important thing is we’er not trying to tell DOE or the government, you ought to go implement this. The important thing is we think there’s a lot of studies that have to be done. And so we would reinforce what DOE’s doing right now with industry in that we need to do the technical studies, we need to do the business planning, you need to provide that information so that the government can make that informed decision.

So I would reinforce what you’re saying, and from that standpoint, even though

we believe that it’s been demonstrated from what AREVA’s been doing in France – and there are other countries that have new reprocessing contracts I can also share with you – but we think that the important thing now is we need to make an informed decision. It doesn’t have to be a rushed decision. Working with the utilities – it needs to be the utilities. But the important thing is to really to make an informed decision and to study this now so that we can decide, but we do believe this is viable possibility for spent fuel management in the United States – if we’re going to move forward with nuclear.

MR. GOLDEMBERG: Pardon me, would you explain please what is BCG? Q: Sorry, the Boston Consulting Group. They did an economic analysis last year

looking at reprocessing and whether you could close the fuel cycle. The difference between what’s been presented, in particular if you just look at storage – which again, we think is safe because we supply over 60 percent of the casks to the United States – that’s not the issue. The thing is, though, we think that there are other things especially the cost to Yucca Mountain, and when you start talking about, based on the MIT report, that it could be multiple numbers of Yucca Mountains that we’re going to have to build – you have to take all of that into account when you’re looking at the lifecycle cost, not just storage casks.

MR. GOLDEMBERG: Okay. Q: Thank you. The floor is then open for discussion. MR. VON HIPPEL: Just one comment. The Boston Consulting Group was a

group which did a study paid for by AREVA and concluded that in the U.S., in contrast to France, that the cost of the French-style recycling, of sending the plutonium around once in light water reactors could be competitive with a once-through fuel cycle. I think the key assumptions there were that they assumed that another Yucca Mountain would have to built – a second Yucca Mountain repository would have to be built – which is questionable because, in fact, the limit on the capacity of Yucca Mountain that is usually discussed is, in fact, the legislated limit which was intended by Congress to force a second repository – not a physical limit. And the Bush administration has proposed to remove the legislated limit. But the other thing is that they assumed during the time horizon covered by that study that the spent MOX fuel would stay at the reprocessing plant. And so they didn’t have any of the costs of dealing with spent MOX fuel. Is that a fair summary? I see you don’t agree with that.

Q: (Off mike). They actually did put in an estimate of what they thought a fast reactor would cost, because the thought was – and France holds the same opinion – is you’re not going to stop, even if you recycle in light water reactors now. The point is you’re going to have to go to fast sooner or later, but we don’t believe that’s right now. So they did include the fast reactor, and they put a 30 percent premium on it which is the estimate right now on the cost difference between a PWR and a fast reactor.

MR. VON HIPPEL: Okay, we’ll have to discuss that further. MR. GOLDEMBERG: Okay, thank you. Tom, please. Q: As I recall from the disclaimer in front of – MR. GOLDEMBERG: Would you – MR. : If you want your words to be recorded in history – MR. GOLDEMBERG: (Chuckles.) Step up and present yourself even though we

all know you. Q: All right. Tom Cochran. As I recall from the disclaimer in the front of the

Boston study group’s report, they did not vouch for any of the economic assumptions, but used AREVA’s assumptions and disclaimed any credit or knowledge about the reliability of it.

MR. GOLDEMBERG: Thank you. Q: I’m Wayne Glass from the University of Southern California. Let me ask sort

of the unspoken question here among the panel members. Would you please give us your estimate of the security of these spent fuels and the separated plutonium in your respected countries and what you know about that from – security from the point of view of smuggling; security from the point of view of terrorist events.

MR. WALKER: To be – I haven’t been directly involved in that issue, but all I

can say is from the British government’s point of view is the security issue is not actually the spent fuel. Although there is – for Magnox fuel, there has long been a question about the problems of holding Magnox fuel in water ponds. And there have been periods in nuclear history where that has been a difficulty, where you’ve had actually Magnox fuel in ponds degrading, and it’s not so much a security in terms of terrorism attack or anything like that. It’s simply a matter of safety and good husbandry.

The big security concern when you have reprocessing is the separation of high

level wastes, and if you don’t get your treatment technology to work effectively, you have to remember that there, in fact, in the back end of the fuel cycle, there are actually three kinds of technological processes that have to work effectively. One is the

reprocessing technology itself, the second is the vitrification technology to deal with the high level waste coming out, and the third is the actual MOX and recycling technology.

And in the U.K. case, they (have/haven’t ?) mastered the MOX technology, it has

to be said, although it came very late, and they didn’t also master the vitrification technology, and they weren’t actually nearly as successful as the French were in this. And one consequence was that you had this accumulation of liquid high-level waste in tanks. It was not properly guarded, and so relative to the security of the spent fuel – I mean it was a great fright I’ll have to say after 9/11.

You know, if you had an aircraft crashing into that, it would be far worse than

Chernobyl and that was seen to be a really serious problem. If you don’t actually get your waste treatment technology running in parallel with and at the same rate as your reprocessing, you can hit really serious problems.

MR. SUZUKI: For physical protection and safeguards of the plutonium costs

have not been disclosed, and the only number I have is a government budget for safeguards. That may include physical protection also, and as of fiscal year 2005, it’s roughly 3.5 billion yen – thirty million dollars -- for total in Japan.

MR. VON HIPPEL: I might just add that, as far as theft of plutonium is

concerned, the worry is more during transport than from the facilities themselves. And there’s a huge amount of transport going on in France because it is recycling the plutonium. The plutonium is transported from the north of France where it’s separated to the south of France where it’s fabricated into mixed oxide fuel. I don’t know about terrorists, but Greenpeace has intercepted the shipments. And then, of course, after it’s fabricated into mixed oxide fuel which contains seven to nine percent plutonium, it is then shipped to separate reactor sites in France, Germany and all over Europe – and to Japan, if Japan ever gets its MOX program going up.

MR. GOLDEMBERG: Okay, thank you. Sir, please. Q: There is a lot of discussion about – MR. GOLDEMBERG: Would you please identify yourself? Q: Yes – (inaudible). There is a lot of discussion about internationalizing the fuel

cycle and the procedure. I imagine that internationalizing the present facility is not the top priority – is not even the top discussion item. But still, I would like to have a feeling if there is a sense of – a movement in that direction, and if it be – (inaudible) – represents – (inaudible) – Japan, is interested (?) in giving a good example in terms of allowing not only inspection which is a different thing, but allowing in perspective international stuff to work and incorporate at these facilities.

MR. GOLDEMBERG: Yes.

MR. SUZUKI: The government has been discussing the idea of international – multinational approach for fuel cycle – basically in favor of it. But for existing facilities, there is no plan to do that, but the Japanese government had just published a proposal to the IAEA for a new registration for fuel fabrication capacity and fuel stock-piling – more for the front end of the fuel cycle rather than the back end of the fuel cycle.

MR. VON HIPPEL: I wonder whether I could add something. I think it’s much

more interesting to talk about multi-nationalizing the enrichment part of the fuel cycle, because enrichment, of course, is needed. Reprocessing is not needed. On the enrichment side, of course, URENCO, in way, is a multinational. On the reprocessing side, we have already seen how the vision that we heard from Clay Sells has worked out. The French, the Russians and the U.K. all have been reprocessing for other countries on a large scale, and the other countries have decided to stop doing that. I mean instead of this being the wave of the future, it’s the wave of the past which is receding.

The reason that other countries have stopped sending their spent fuel to France,

and the U.K. for reprocessing is because the French and British sent back the high level waste. So they basically recreated the problem of storing this high-level waste that is coming back. If France and the U.K. had been willing to keep the high-level waste, I think they could have kept the business. And Russia is now adopting this policy as well. The vision the DOE is promulgating is that somehow, the reprocessing service countries would keep the high-level waste, but no country has been willing to do it, and I certainly think that the U.S. would not be willing to do it. We had a terrible fight over taking research reactor fuel from other countries, which has highly enriched uranium.

MR. GOLDEMBERG: Yes. MR. WALKER: Yes, in the British case, when the proposals first came forward

for the THORP facility, it was seen as an international, multinational proposal, and, in fact, it was really in response to the Americans’ withdraw from reprocessing that both the British and the French went heavily into this. And in the legitimizing of this proposal in the U.K. Parliament in the 1977-1978, one of the conditions that was attached actually as a consequence of public pressure was, in fact, that all – as Frank mentioned – all plutonium waste had to go back to the country of origin. And so, if you do have this kind of solution, I think you see even applying now in Russia is that you do have to return the stuff.

And I’ll simply add here that it just – it sounds very easy in principle, but in fact

that actual working out of that in practice – all the shipments, all the coordinations, coordinating the licensing processes in different countries – has turned out to be very difficult. Now again, I accept that in the French case in regard to Germany, Switzerland and some other places, after a long process, there has been some working out of this, but it does in fact become very, very complicated. And I think in the French case, in fact, that it is actually illegal to hold materials in France over the long term. It has to be returned, so it actually drives a kind of recycling process. But it is very complex. And I think the main resistance I see in the back end of the fuel cycle to multinational fuel cycle

facilities is actually domestic, and the perception is, in fact, that other countries are transferring risks and harms to your self. And I suspect that in the U.S. case, too, when it came down to it, the idea of accepting spent fuels from other countries without any guarantee or confidence necessarily that the stuff would go back would become, domestically, a difficult issue to handle.

MR. GOLDEMBERG: Please, here up front. I will come to you in a minute,

please. Q: Yves Marignac from WISE-Paris, France. I very much agree on what

AREVA said that we need to take informed decisions, and I think we need a very thorough assessment of the French situation because William Walker was describing the U.K. situation as a management failure and so on, but France, in comparison, has been a successful story of reprocessing. So it’s very worth analyzing what’s the current status of plutonium management, waste management and economics of reprocessing in France based on that so-called successful experience, and I wanted to make a few comments on that.

First one regarding plutonium management. While maybe the plutonium stock

has been slightly decreasing recently, but the main picture is that it went up from zero tons of separated plutonium when the MOX program started in 1987 to almost 50 tons – that’s for the French part of plutonium stockpiling in France – almost 50 tons today. And also, you have to consider what the status of the MOX program is, and the difficulties with MOX using. One of them is safety problems, and that resulted in a failure of EDF, the French utility, to get license to increased MOX fuel burn-up. I mean, they’ve been trying for 10 years to get a license for a burner for MOX fuel higher than 42 gigawatt day per ton, and in 10 years they couldn’t get while in the same time, the authorized burner for uranium fuel has been rising very sharply, and that’s because of specific safety problems with MOX fuel. And in the meantime, burnup hasn’t risen, but the plutonium share in MOX fuel has been up from five percent to almost eight percent today.

Another problem you have to consider with MOX is MOX’s scraps and there’s a

huge amount of irradiated plutonium in MOX scraps piling up at the Hague, waiting for a potential reprocessing somewhere. It’s been up to 10 percent of scrap MOX coming out of the MELOX MOX fabrication plant in Marcoule, so there are problems with plutonium reused in MOX that should be addressed.

Another issue is waste management, and one should consider a full assessment of

waste – long-lived waste – piling up as a result of reprocessing in France, and probably the whole volume of this long-lived waste is already more than the volume of the spent fuel if it had remained unreprocessed, and a large part of this volume is poorly conditioned or unconditioned, so there are big questions there. And projections of the corresponding volume of geological disposal suggests that actually the need – the size of geological disposal might be also bigger than if France went for direct disposal .

Lastly, coming to economics, I think Frank von Hippel mentioned an off-shore report back in 2000 commissioned by the French prime minister on the economics of reprocessing which undoubtedly showed – concluded in higher costs of reprocessing compared to direct disposal. And this has been addressed since then in a very strange way by the Ministry of Industry which, on one hand recognizes that reprocessing is more expensive than direct disposal, but then it tried to reduce the assessment of these other costs, and what they did is they asked AREVA on the projected cost of the processing.

The 2000 study concluded, based on AREVA’s data, that the rent of cost for

reprocessing was between $1,200 and $1,600 per kilogram. That’s experience from La Hague, and that’s based on industry’s costs, including the projected decommissioning costs which are probably underestimated if you look at the experience of the first Marcoule reprocessing plant where decommissioning costs have been rising since the decommissioning has started. But $1,200 to $1,600, and the projected costs that AREVA provided the Ministry of Industry with for future estimated costs of nuclear generation is $650 per kilogram, so it’s twice cheaper, and AREVA uses this hypothesis that investment cost and operation cost would be twice cheaper in the future plant than in La Hague, and the Ministry of Industry’s report states that this hypothesis is used and is an objective for AREVA because that’s the cost where reprocessing and direct disposal become equal.

So it’s not a realistic projection; it’s kind of a politic projection so that the future

costs might appear equal, and that $650 per kilogram is roughly the hypothesis that the Boston Consulting Group used in its American study. So it’s not realistic cost; it’s political protection. Thank you.

MR. GOLDEMBERG: We are approaching the end of our session, I think. At

the back, please. Yes. Q: Thank you. Stephen Dolly with Platts Nuclear Publications. In a previous

professional life, I did a good deal of work on fuel cycle economics, and I just wanted to get the opinion of the panel quickly on a couple of issues I hadn’t heard discussed here today relating to conventional reprocessing and recycle. First is the cost of storing separated plutonium versus storing spent fuel. It’s getting to be a pretty old report now, but OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency back in the early to mid-nineties was using an estimate I think of a dollar or two per year, per gram of plutonium for storage. It’s difficult to imagine it’s gone down significantly in real terms, and it’s difficult to imagine it would be cheaper to store separated actinides, and advanced fuel cycles tend to be prone to delay, especially in their early stages. Would the costs of storing separated plutonium still be a potentially significant economic issue?

And the second issue I hadn’t heard discussed is the buildup of americium in

separated plutonium which has the potential to make the use of that plutonium subsequently in MOX fuel more complex, at least in LWRs. So any perspectives from the panel on either or both of those issues would be appreciated.

MR. VON HIPPEL: Okay, well I just did a quick back of the envelope calculation and your one to two dollars per gram is about the same as the cost of storing the plutonium in the form of spent fuel. And of course you’re right with regard to americium buildup. What happens is the plutonium-241 decays with a 14-year half-life of americium-241 and americium-241 dose emit a significant amount of gammas – not self-protecting, but it creates an occupational health hazard for workers working in a MOX plant. And therefore it used to be that, after several years of storage, before that plutonium could be fabricated into MOX, it had to be processed again to separate out the americium.

MR. SUZUKI: Yeah, I think the americium issue is a critical issue for

maintaining a recycling program. That’s one of the reasons that utilities wants to recycle plutonium as soon as possible. Right now, plutonium in Europe is accumulating -- storing for more than six or seven years, so it’s approaching to the limit. So it may add future MOX fabrication costs.

MR. GOLDEMBERG: Okay. Is there a last question? MR. : Or answer? (Laughter.) MR. GOLDEMBERG: All right. Well, thank you very much. I think it was a

very informative session. I would like a round of applause for our panel. (Applause.) (END)