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Senate Approves Plutonium Reprocessing Initiatives By David Ruppe WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate yesterday overwhelmingly approved a $30.5 billion fiscal 2006 energy and water appropriations bill that provides $130 million for controversial plutonium separation activities (see GSN, Nov. 8). The bill does not provide $4 million requested by the Bush administration for study of the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, but adds $10 million to the $15 million sought for the Reliable Replacement Warhead Program, and fully funds the National Ignition Facility at $142 million. The bill significantly cuts money for development of the planned Yucca Mountain storage site, providing $450 million compared to $577 million last year. Lawmakers approved $220 million for constructing a mixed-oxide fuel processing plant at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, though the House earlier this year approved no funding for the program. The plant is to convert 34 tons of weapon-grade plutonium into fuel for nuclear reactors. It “is America’s first significant effort in moving ahead with reprocessing. It starts by a giant step [of converting] plutonium that comes from thousands of nuclear weapons that have been reduced, eliminated, and the plutonium remains,” Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) said yesterday on the Senate floor. “We were able to fund it by long and hard negotiations. It was one of the items that held this bill up,” he said. The bill also includes funding for two nuclear fuel reprocessing initiatives: roughly $80 million to continue spent fuel reprocessing research under the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative and $50 million to research advanced plutonium separation technology. Reprocessing separates plutonium in spent nuclear reactor fuel from remaining nuclear waste, making it available for use in reactors or weapons. The latter project would allow Energy to build an engineering-scale demonstration reprocessing plant, select sites for full-scale plants by fiscal 2007, and begin construction on those sites by fiscal 2010. The plants would be used for “extracting more plutonium from spent fuel. And in addition to some other unspecified advanced technologies, which they haven’t even chosen yet, it would presumably lead to a whole new generation of reactor types that would utilize this material,” said Ed Lyman, an analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Critics say reprocessing would create plutonium theft opportunities for terrorists and undermine efforts to discourage other countries from reprocessing. “These projects threaten our national security, our public health and our safety. And they are wildly expensive. This funding would be better spent finding safer sites for deep geologic disposal with strict, protective public health standards,” Natural Resources Defense Council Nuclear Program Director Thomas Cochran said in a prepared statement. Proponents of reprocessing say the resulting plutonium and uranium could be used for new fuel elements for nuclear power plants and could help deal with spent fuel storage issues associated with the incomplete Yucca Mountain site. The research program calls for developing and evaluating potential “proliferation-resistant” fuel recycling technologies. “It is … time to think about our reluctance to reprocess spent fuel. The Europeans are doing this very successfully, and there are some advanced reprocessing technologies in the research and development phase that promise to reduce or eliminate some of the disadvantages of the current chemical process,” House Energy and Water Appropriation Subcommittee Chairman David Hobson (R-Ohio) said on the House floor earlier this year.
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