REPROCESSING 101

Reprocessing in Other Countries

Reprocessing in other countries is, essentially, an expensive shell game. It allows waste to be moved here and there, depending on the volume of citizen protest in different locations.

According to Princeton physicist Frank von Hippel, writing recently in Scientific American,

In France and Japan, reprocessing actually increases the price of electricity.

“Until recently, France, Russia and the U.K. earned money by reprocessing the spent fuel of other nations, such as Japan and Germany, where domestic antinuclear activists demanded that the government either show it had a solution for dealing with spent fuel or shut down its reactors. Authorities in these nations found that sending their spent fuel abroad for reprocessing was a convenient, if costly, way to deal with their nuclear wastes – at least temporarily.” MORE

However, according to von Hippel, this strategy eventually backfired:

“[Reprocessing] agreements specified, however, that the separated plutonium and any highly radioactive waste would later go back to the country of origin…. That reality took a while to sink in, but it has now convinced almost all nations that bought foreign reprocessing services that they might as well store their spent fuel and save the reprocessing fee of about $1 million per ton (10 times the cost of dry storage casks).” MORE

The result is that reprocessing facilities in France, Russia, and the U.K. have lost virtually all their foreign customers. Here are the results in all the countries involved, according to von Hippel, recent studies by the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM), and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:

• UNITED KINGDOM: “[T]he U.K. plans to shut down its reprocessing plants within the next few years, a move that comes with a $92 billion price tag for cleaning up the site of these facilities.” MORE
  
  
• RUSSIA: “Russia today has just a single reprocessing plant, with the ability to handle the spent fuel from only 15 percent of the country’s nuclear reactors.” MORE
  
  
• GERMANY: “Germany’s anti-nuclear movement finally succeeded in persuading the…government to stop reprocessing and eventually phase out nuclear power in Germany…. ” MORE at 11.
  
  
• FRANCE: France is perhaps the most interesting case of all. According to a recent report by the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM), the industry there “has benefited from strong financial, technical, and political support. The French experience therefore constitutes a case of reprocessing under optimal conditions.” MORE at 2

Nonetheless, as noted above, France has lost virtually all its foreign reprocessing customers. A recent report from Areva, the government-owned nuclear services conglomerate, says that 99.8% of the spent fuel coming into its primary facility now comes from French reactors. Still, the shell game continues. According to von Hippel,

“In France, the world leader in reprocessing technology, the separated plutonium…is mixed with uranium…to make a ‘mixed oxide,’ or MOX, fuel. After being used to generate more power…the MOX fuel is shipped back to the reprocessing facility for indefinite storage. Thus, France is, in effect, using reprocessing to move its problems with spent fuel from the reactor sites to the reprocessing plant.” MORE

Moreover, because MOX fuel is more expensive to use in today’s reactors than uranium, reprocessing is actually raising the cost of electricity. According to the IPFM’s recent report,

“In 2000, an official report commissioned by the French Prime Minister concluded that the choice of reprocessing instead of direct disposal of spent nuclear fuel for the entire French nuclear program would result in an increase in average generation cost of about 5.5 percent…or an 85 percent increase of the total spent fuel and waste management…costs.” MORE at 3.

Citing this same report, von Hippel tells us that “France considered the option of ending reprocessing in 2010 and concluded that doing so would reduce the cost of nuclear electricity.” MORE

In addition to examining cost issues, the IPFM report also looked at waste issues in France. Comparing reprocessing to simple on-site storage, the study concluded that “there is no clear advantage for the reprocessing option either in terms of waste volumes or repository area.” MORE at 4.

The bottom line, then, is that reprocessing in France is just an expensive way to move nuclear waste from one place to the other.

• JAPAN: Meanwhile, Japan is pursuing an expensive and illogical reprocessing program of its own. Like France, Japan plans to produce mixed-oxide, or MOX fuel. The fuel is so expensive to use, though, that Japan will simply store it until, someday, it might make economic sense to use it. The waste generated by reprocessing will also be stored until, someday, a permanent disposal site is created.

The illogic of Japan’s reprocessing effort was evident to representatives of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who visited the site several years ago. They noted a report by the Japanese Atomic Energy Agency Commission which revealed that

“it was cheaper to bury spent fuel as waste than to reprocess it into fuel. The cost of generating a kilowatt-hour of electricity would be 4.5 yen if the fuel is buried but rises to 5.2 yen with reprocessing.” MORE

The Carnegie Endowment concluded that Japan continued to pursue reprocessing because, even though “Japanese economic models supporting reprocessing were based on flawed assumptions,” it was not “easy to walk away from” the country’s $20 billion investment. MORE

Further, the Endowment pointed out that nuclear waste would soon exceed storage capacity at Japanese nuclear reactors. The new reprocessing facility, located in a distant rural province, provided “the key to solving this problem, at least politically.” Without reprocessing, the Endowment noted, Japanese officials believe that

“local opposition to the radioactive waste would re-ignite, power plants would have nowhere to move their spent fuel, and the nuclear power industry would collapse.” MORE

Moreover, the International Panel on Fissile Materials reports that the cost of reprocessing is so high in Japan that utilities cannot “afford such high economic risks.” Therefore, in 2005, the Japanese Diet established a new tax on utility consumers to pay for construction and operation of the new reprocessing facility – even though Japan won’t be able to afford to use the fuel that reprocessing will produce for decades to come. MORE at 3, 12.

Thus, it appears that the most “successful” reprocessing nations to date, France and Japan, are not models the U.S. would wish to emulate. Both nations are simply running up the price of electricity in order to move nuclear waste from one location to another – that old shell game.

Next time someone tells you that reprocessing in France and Japan is a success, ask them what constitutes failure.

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