Can reprocessing offer a solution for San Onofre, other nuclear issues?

Today, a look at why we’re stuck with 3.6 million pounds of nuclear waste at San Onofre — and a glimpse of the future.

The folks who dreamed up America’s peaceful nuclear power program always envisioned a “closed fuel cycle,” vastly shrinking the amount of highly radioactive waste we’d have to grapple with at the back end. Used fuel would be removed from reactor cores, shipped to a central plant and chemically reprocessed. Unburned uranium and plutonium would be separated out and used again. The rest of the stuff, now radioactive at much lower levels, would be buried.

That’s how it works now in France, Japan, Russia. But not here.

In the U.S., folks were spooked that reprocessing might let uranium and plutonium fall into terrorists’ hands. So in 1976, President Gerald Ford put a hold on starting up a new reprocessing plant. The following year, President Jimmy Carter deferred it indefinitely.

And here we are, nearly 50 years later. America never figured out what the heck else to do with nuclear waste, so it piles up at reactor sites all over the nation. Like at San Onofre. And at Diablo Canyon.

Enter now a new company asserting that the U.S. never actually banned reprocessing. It is — gasp — planning to open its own pilot reprocessing plant!

Can you do that?

“Policy in the U.S. enables recycling on a commercial scale,” said Everett Redmond, senior director of fuel affairs for Oklo, during a recent panel discussion with the American Nuclear Society.

“The NRC has a regulation, looked at updating it, but brought that to a halt. We believe it doesn’t need to be changed. We don’t need NRC rulemaking. We started engagement with NRC last year and are in pre-application activities. From our perspective, recycling absolutely is doable in the U.S.”

Really?! Legally allowable? After all these years of nothing?

Indeed

Yep, as it turns out.

“The (Nuclear Regulatory) Commission determined in 2021 that current regulations under 10 CFR Part 50 are adequate to license a reprocessing facility, noting that some exemptions from regulatory requirements may be needed specific to individual facility designs,” NRC spokesman David McIntyre said by email. “So the webinar speakers were correct that new regulations are not required.

“Oklo has been in pre-application consultation with us and submitted a licensing project plan last December,” he said, sort of burying the lead, as we say in the news biz.

The plan itself is proprietary, so riffraff like us can’t see it. But, wow.

Oklo is a nuclear startup working on next-generation reactors. It isn’t envisioning reprocessing America’s vast backlog of commercial nuclear waste right now, but rather, just its own. The primary reason is economics, Redmond said. Reprocessing the fuel is simply cheaper.

Still. Any sort of commercial reprocessing of nuclear fuel in America feels like an enormous step out of the freeze frame we’ve been stuck in for the past 40 or so years.

David Victor, professor at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy and chair of the San Onofre Community Engagement Panel (a volunteer group that advises Southern California Edison on San Onofre’s decommissioning), cautioned us not to get too excited.

“This may have a role, quite a ways down the road, in helping to address some of the volume of spent fuel,” Victor said by email.

“But it does not eliminate spent fuel. It still requires the capacity to move the fuel away from a place like San Onofre, open it up and re-process, and then re-package what is left over. And there is still a need for storage and still need for a permanent repository, albeit with different volumes and a different business model.

“One of my concerns is that people often focus on flavor of the season,” Victor said. “But we need a solution for civilian spent nuclear fuel, it doesn’t rely on yet another industry being created.”

And concerns about reprocessing nuclear fuel leading to nuclear weapons proliferation remain, he said.

The U.S. Department of Energy continues its efforts to find both temporary and permanent storage for America’s vast backlog of commercial nuclear waste. It’s also sinking some money into recycling projects. If those projects, and Oklo’s pilot, can show that reprocessing is just as viable here as it is in Europe and Japan, the DOE may eventually have a far easier time finding a permanent home for nuclear waste.

Source: Orange County Register