The reliably anti-nuclear Atlanta Journal-Constitution has published an opinion piece (
Google cache) by the executive director of the Atlanta branch of
Women's Action for New Directions--which is fairly predictable in its ignorance of the subject.
The individual points are detailed below; I've prepared
a one-pager on reprocessing for general reference.
1. Apparently there's some vast conspiracy in which everybody who advocates for reprocessing is paid off by President Bush to do so. Hey, why didn't anybody tell me about it?
2. GNEP is not being "heavily marketed by the nuclear industry." The Department of Energy is pushing GNEP; all the industry wants is to get spent fuel off their hands, which means Yucca Mountain, not GNEP.
3. The writer confuses the old reprocessing process (PUREX, a military-surplus technology used for extracting weapons-grade plutonium at bomb factories) with the new process that GNEP would use (UREX+, which is designed specifically for recycling). UREX+ does not produce liquid waste.
4. The writer apparently also thinks that we don't know the difference between reprocessing and recycling; recycling is the reuse of materials from spent fuel in reactors, and recycling must involve reprocessing, which is a broad label applied to anything that recovers materials from fuel rods. Recycling involves reprocessing, but reprocessing does not necessarily involve recycling.
5. The US used the PUREX plutonium-extraction process at Hanford and the Savannah River Site to (surprise, surprise) extract plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. Horror stories from those two sites do not apply to GNEP because those sites did not use UREX+.
6. I don't know where she gets the idea that PUREX reprocessing has anything to do with producing highly-enriched uranium (which itself is not necessarily weapons-grade)--highly-enriched uranium is produced at a uranium enrichment facility, which separates isotopes of uranium by weight. A PUREX facility uses a chemical process to separate plutonium from the rest of the spent fuel.
7. Even if PUREX were used for reprocessing prior to recycling, it would not result in weapons-grade plutonium because nuclear power plants do not produce weapons-grade plutonium, and PUREX only
separates plutonium, whatever type of plutonium you have. To make weapons-grade plutonium, a country would need specialized weapons-production reactors similar to the one used at
Chernobyl; no nuclear power plant outside of the former Soviet Union works like that. In fact, the author (deliberately?) obscures this by saying that the sites reprocessed fuel during the Cold War, without mentioning that the spent fuel involved came from military reactors.
8. There's no such thing as a "simple" plutonium-based nuclear weapon.
9. The extracted uranium would be reused if these people wouldn't get in the way; furthermore, UREX+ never separates the uranium from the plutonium, so we would have to. This is the subtle difference between what the French do with their military-surplus PUREX facility (separating the plutonium from everything else, separating the uranium from the remainder, storing some of the uranium, mixing the rest of it in with the plutonium, and using it once and only once more in their current reactors) and what GNEP proposes (separating the unused fuel--uranium and plutonium together--storing the highly-radioactive but short-lived already-split atoms, and reusing it as many times as necessary in an advanced reactor). That's what we mean when we say that we advocate recycling: to reuse as much of it as possible, including some of the already-split atoms that are useful as industrial catalysts.
10. There will be no stockpiles of separated plutonium because UREX+ does not separate plutonium. Furthermore, the type of reactors that use fresh uranium are not the type of reactors that would reuse fuel from GNEP, so the industry's preference vis a vis the cost of each type of fuel does not really apply--the two fuel types are not competing against each other. And if storing spent fuel gets expensive enough, they will recycle on economic grounds.
11. Once again, reprocessing does not involve enrichment, so I don't know what she means by "
newly-enriched" (emphasis mine).
12. Something else that is not clear to this person is that the plutonium isotope that makes reactor-grade plutonium reactor-grade and not weapons-grade decays faster than the weapons-grade isotope. While it is not possible to separate them mechanically or chemically, waiting several centuries will produce that result. Their standard response is that it is possible to use reactor-grade plutonium in weapons; it isn't, but that's not the point. If it were possible, it would be to our advantage to get rid of the plutonium by splitting its atoms in half in reactors rather than burying it for someone to find later. We have to do something with it, and burying it as though it were waste is a lose-lose option.
13. The advanced reactors that would be built under GNEP are actually much, much safer than the ones operating today (read: ones designed in the 1960s). These reactors control their reaction rate with physics, not active pumps and valves; prototypes of these reactors have had their cooling systems shut off while at full power without incident. A Chernobyl-style accident is physically impossible in these reactors--a key engineering factor that describes the response of the reactor to temperature increases is positive at Chernobyl-type reactors and negative in these reactors, meaning that their reaction rate goes down when the temperature goes up. It's all physics. It doesn't depend on the good intentions of operators or whether George Bush is dumb; these reactors are safe. Period. Osama bin Laden and Homer Simpson could both be at the controls. It doesn't matter.
14. GNEP is untested. Guilty as charged. But if we only did things that had already been tested, we'd still be swinging in trees.
15. GNEP, contrary to what she says, is actually a cleanup program. The "waste" that we've already made, if reprocessed and recycled, contains enough unused fuel to power the US for 500 years--and the actual waste itself decays within 300 (as opposed to 10,000 for current "waste"). If we want to clean up the legacy of the 1950s, we should turn long-lived materials into short-lived ones, and generate electricity while we're doing it, as soon as possible.
16. GNEP will require billions of dollars; so will everything else. What's the cost of guarding 500 years' worth of fuel for 10,000 years instead of using it?
I hope I'm not the only one to see parallels between the tactics used here and the tactics of creationists and "Moon hoax" conspiracy theorists; dear scientists and engineers, they're one and the same, and need to be fought as hard as the creationists. Plain and simple, they are trying to destroy science for political purposes. We've gotta kick their butts, or there won't be science and engineering professions for our kids.
Labels: Conspiracy, Economics, Fuel Cycle, Physics, Plutonium, Proliferation
