Nuclear fuel recycling: The time has come

Suppose you're President Jimmy Carter and/or a global-warming whacko. Suppose you want -- for some semi-religious reason -- to limit per-capita energy consumption. Suppose you want all Americans to do penance for some imagined past sin, to wear hair shirts and to sit -- in the lotus position -- or kneel, shivering, in the dark. Then, you ought to drastically increase the regulatory and tax burden on the producers and suppliers of coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear energy, and get Congress to throw the zillions of dollars of additional revenue obtained through taxing those producers out the window at producers of alternative energy sources. And, while you're at it, you might as well slap price controls on any energy supplied to the consumer by "Big Oil." That is what President Carter did in the late '70s when he had an energy-supply crisis.

Of course, President Carter made the crisis worse by doing so.

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Now, suppose you're President Bush and you've also confronted with an energy supply crisis. But, suppose you don't want all Americans to do penance for the past sins of Jimmy Carter and the environmental whackos. Suppose you want energy supply to at least keep up with the growth in population, and you don't want any Americans to freeze in the dark. Then, you ought to drastically reduce the regulatory and tax burden on the producers and suppliers of coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear energy. And whatever you do, don't slap price controls on energy supplied to the consumer. That is basically what President Bush has proposed to do in his National Energy Plan just released.

But, even before his plan was released, the media elite and the global warming whackos launched their preemptive strike. Here is the lead paragraph in the Washington Post report on the president's plan, written before the plan had been released to anyone, including -- to their dismay -- the Washington Post.

White House officials last night unveiled a national energy policy that seeks to build support for controversial increases in oil drilling and energy production by linking such provisions to alternative and renewable energy sources favored by environmentalists.

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Now, how's that for unbiased news reporting? Nothing in their lead paragraph about there being an energy crisis. Nothing about the rolling blackouts. Nothing about the critical shortage of electrical generating and transmission capacity in California and on the West Coast, expected to spread to the East Coast this summer. Nothing about sky-high natural gas and electricity prices caused by a paucity of natural gas transmission pipelines. Nothing about sky-high prices of gasoline, which because of EPA clean air restrictions, now have to be separately reformulated for each of 17 different regions of the country. And, of course, nothing at all about how President Bush proposes to deal with the energy crisis he has inherited.

As far as the casual observer here in Washington can tell, there is no energy crisis. It is something the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy cooked up so as to give Dubya an excuse to pay off "Big Oil" by giving them the right to drill for oil on the Arctic ice floes where seals, polar bears and environmental whackos all roam.

And what really has the Washington Post reporters and environmental whackos especially outraged is that Dubya -- who must be a lot smarter than they thought he was -- has suggested to Congress that it would be all right for them to throw more money out the window to those producers with economically bankrupt alternative energy sources -- windmills, solar cells, fermented garbage and geothermal -- but that the money that Congress throws out the window must come out of the revenues produced by leasing parts of Alaska's National Wildlife Refuge for oil and natural gas exploration and production. That is, no leasing revenues, no subsidized windmills.

Yes, sirree, a lot smarter.

On the other hand, if "Big Oil" finds lots of oil and natural gas in Alaska, and begins producing lots of it for you soccer moms, in five to 10 years there will be lots of leasing revenues pouring into the U.S. Treasury and five to 10 years from now the whackos can begin covering California and Connecticut with subsidized windmills -- if they can find enough neighborhoods that insist on having one. According to a former Clinton administration official in charge of covering the countryside with windmills, one of these mammoth windmills can provide -- when the wind is blowing -- the electricity needed by a community of 200 homes.

But, in five to 10 years, the Bush-Cheney administration will have caused -- through regulatory reform and tax cuts -- the energy supply sector to have constructed and brought on-line the nuclear and coal-fired power plants, transmission lines, oil refineries, oil and natural gas pipelines and related facilities that should have been built over the past ten years, but weren't. The current energy crisis is a direct result of the energy supply sector not being allowed to look for new supplies of energy or to construct and bring on-line needed energy facilities. But, once those facilities are on-line, there won't be an energy crisis.

So, the environmental whackos want you to focus on the environmental crises -- clean air and global warming -- which they claim President Bush will make worse. They don't want you to focus on the energy crisis he proposes to solve. The Washington Post quotes David Hawkins of the Natural Resources Defense Council thusly:

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I think there are a few good things [in the president's Plan] on efficiency and renewable fuels, but they don't outweigh the damage done both by the production subsidies and the environmental exemptions and drilling in the Arctic.

The whackos intend to oppose all of the president's proposals to increase fossil fuel use on the grounds of environmental insult. They will even oppose the burning of natural gas -- which produces no pollutants to be regulated -- on the grounds that the carbon dioxide and water vapor produced are "greenhouse gases," and hence are man-made contributors to global warming.

But the one element of the President's National Energy Plan that may cause the most pain in the environmental whacko community -- which also tends to be the anti-nuclear power community -- is that President Bush has decided to revisit the decision by President Carter to forego the recycling of nuclear fuel elements. And the problem for the whacko community is that the president has four compelling reasons for doing so. One is related to solving the energy crisis, a second is related to reducing the global warming threat, a third is related to minimizing environmental insult, and the fourth -- and far most important -- is related to addressing the Russian loose-nuke threat.

The biggest problem for the environmental wacko anti-nuclear power community is that in solving the energy crisis, nuclear power produces neither pollutants nor greenhouse gases. Burning coal or oil produces pollutants -- such as sulfur dioxide -- and greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide. Burning natural gas produces greenhouse gases, but no pollutants.

So there go reasons one and two and the whackos are reduced to opposing nuclear power because of the highly localized potential environmental insult posed to a few acres of some godforsaken and uninhabited piece of mountain-desert by the siting of a spent-fuel burial ground there.

When a fuel element is removed from a typical nuclear power reactor, it is highly radioactive. But in terms of fissile materials (Uranium and Plutonium) -- which are not highly radioactive -- the spent fuel element is still worth, in terms of its ability to generate electricity, about two-thirds of what it was originally worth. President Carter had been convinced by Greenpeace and anti-nuclear whackos that recycling of unspent fuel from nuclear power reactors presented an unacceptable nuclear weapon proliferation risk. Greenpeace et al claimed that it would be all too easy for a terrorist group to steal the Plutonium, once recovered from spent fuel, and make a crude nuclear weapon.

So President Carter decreed that the owners of the highly radioactive spent-fuel elements could not chemically process them, even to separate out the very small percentage of fission by-products that were highly radioactive, and to store them separately. The spent fuel had to be left just as it came out of the reactor, hot as a two-dollar pistol, for several decades. They had to be left that way so that terrorists couldn't even get near the Plutonium contained in the highly radioactive spent fuel.

Intentionally or not, Carter very nearly killed nuclear power in the United States by forcing the electric utilities into this throw-away fuel cycle, wherein the one thing the electric utilities could absolutely not do was throw away their highly radioactive spent fuel. It was theirs to keep forever and forever. Since Carter made his decision more than 20 years ago, no one has even thought about building a new nuclear power plant and all the spent fuel removed from each and every existing U.S. power reactor has been stored temporarily in the reactor operator's back yard swimming pool, cooling off.

More than 20 years after Carter made a government-operated (power plant owner-funded) spent-fuel storage site an absolute requirement, and after billions of dollars have been spent to site it -- and tens of billions of dollars had been extorted from the power-plant operators and set aside to operate the site -- there is not yet even a central interim storage site ready to accept 20 years worth of spent fuel, some of it still highly radioactive, to say nothing of a permanent repository for the spent fuel once -- say, after a hundred years -- it is no longer highly radioactive. Why? Because the same anti-nuclear power whackos who forced the once-through fuel cycle on the nuclear power plant operators in the first place, have now put on their environmental whacko hats and won't allow the owners of all that spent fuel to bury it in a few acres of some godforsaken uninhabited patch of mountain-desert.

But the rest of the world was not affected by Jimmy Carter's decree to not recycle spent fuel, so there has been for 20 years an established Uranium-Plutonium mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel infrastructure in Europe, wherein spent fuel elements of other nations are being chemically processed, the remaining Uranium and Plutonium fuel recovered and made into MOX-fuel, which is then used to generate electricity in Europe, Russia, Japan and elsewhere. The volume of highly radioactive waste -- which is not really all that large even for the throwaway once-through fuel cycle -- is reduced by two orders of magnitude. Since the Europeans and Japanese have been allowed to have their spent fuel reprocessed, they don't have anything like the long-term nuclear waste storage problem the United States has, thanks to Jimmy Carter.

But, here's the kicker. The proliferation fears of President Carter, President Clinton and Greenpeace have been shown to be unfounded. The entire MOX-fuel cycle in Europe has been subject to the Safeguards and Physical Protection regime of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and not only has none of the recovered Plutonium been lost or misplaced, no one has even tried to steal it.

Finally, the fourth -- and most compelling -- reason for revisiting President Carter's decision to forego reprocessing of spent fuel. The number one threat to our national security is -- as it was when Clinton-Gore came to power -- the threat of loose Russian nukes. The Russians fully intend to burn up all their excess Plutonium and weapons-grade Uranium as MOX-fuel. The United States has agreed time after time over the past 10 years to assist -- financially and technically -- the Russians to do that. We have even agreed to dispose of some fraction of our own excess Plutonium that way, all of it under the watchful eyes of the IAEA-NPT regime.

Nevertheless, it was the Clinton-Gore-Greenpeace judgement that the size and scope of the Russian MOX-fuel cycle infrastructure -- even though subject to the IAEA-NPT regime -- would present an even greater long-term nuke proliferation risk than did the excess nukes. So, Clinton-Gore essentially never lived up to the agreements we entered into with the Russians. Other industrialized nations of the G-7 -- citing the 20-year record of the European MOX-fuel cycle -- have not agreed with Clinton-Gore and are so concerned, now, about those Russian "loose nukes" -- enough fissile material to make more than 10,000 nukes -- that they are willing to finance, now, what they believe will eventually be an economically sound Russian MOX-fuel cycle.

So, now comes -- in the wake of what can only be called "dereliction of duty" on all fronts by the Clinton-Gore administration -- the Bush-Cheney administration to confront (1) a real Russian loose-nuke crisis, (2) a real domestic energy-supply crisis (3) a real nuclear-waste storage problem and (4) a perceived global-warming crisis. All four of the problems can be at least partially solved by reversing the Carter decision to forego nuclear fuel recycling. Stay tuned. The shucking and jiving of the environmental whacko anti-nuclear power crowd ought to be fun to watch.