With two decades to go before it can reprocess spent nuclear fuel, the US will have to bury nearly 70,000 tons of it, a research lab reports. It comes after Congress and the Obama administration defunded a planned nuclear waste repository in 2011.
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a facility that does research for the Department of Energy (DOE), said that "about 68,450 [metric tons] or about 98 percent of the total current inventory by mass, can proceed to permanent disposal without the need to ensure retrievability for reuse or research purposes" in its report, published near the end of 2012. The rest of the waste, the report said, could be kept available for research on fuel reprocessing and storage.
The report was fairly obscure until being cited in a DOE document that showed plans to find a new permanent waste dump after Congress and the Obama administration cut funding for the Yucca Mountain repository in 2011.
Reprocessing has little support in Washington due to concerns that spent fuel could fall into the wrong hands. Nevertheless the DOE started looking into reprocessing methods in 2005.
But following the March 2011 disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, US officials became wary of recycling radioactive waste.
The Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, co-chaired by Energy Secretary Steven Chu, said that "no currently available or reasonably foreseeable reactor and fuel cycle technology developments - including advances in reprocessing and recycling technologies - have the potential to fundamentally alter the waste management challenges the nation confronts over at least the next several decades, if not longer" in a report.
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