SeekerBlog

James was interviewed for Nuclear Energy Insight:

January 2011—James Conca is senior scientist for the Institute for Energy and the Environment at New Mexico State University. He is a former director of the Carlsbad Environmental Monitoring and Research Center (CEMRC), an independent project of the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) nuclear waste repository near Carlsbad, N.M.

He is also the co-author, with Judith Wright, of “The Geopolitics of Energy: Achieving a Just and Sustainable Energy Distribution by 2040.” The book advocates a national energy policy that allows the United States to get one-third of its electricity from fossil fuels, one-third from nuclear energy and one-third from renewable energy by 2040.

Nuclear Energy Insight asked Conca to share his perspective on energy policy and radioactive waste disposal.

(…) Q: Tell me about the Waste Isolation Pilot Project.

Conca: WIPP stores defense-related radioactive waste, called transuranic waste. It has to be remotely handled, shielded, the whole bit. We’ve been doing this for 11 years now.

There are no unknowns. We know exactly how much [a deep geologic repository] costs. We know exactly how to do it. It’s incredibly safe. The United States has a deep geologic nuclear repository that’s half-full and nobody even knows about it.

Q: What have been the findings of the Carlsbad Environmental Monitoring and Research Center?

Conca: We have a 15-year record of the environment from before WIPP opened to the present. CEMRC has been operating since 1996 and WIPP since 1999. There’s been no change [in radioactivity at the site].

Read the whole thing. James will be speaking at the National Nuclear Fuel Cycle Summit (NNFCS), taking place April 2-5, 2012 in Carlsbad, New Mexico.

(…) The report also strongly supports the present US government policy of providing loan guarantees for the first several new nuclear plants to be built under newly revised licensing rules. Positive experience with “first-mover” plants—the first of these new US plants built after the current long hiatus—could reduce or eliminate financing premiums for nuclear-plant construction. Once those premiums are eliminated, Forsberg says, “we think nuclear power is economically competitive” with coal power, currently the cheapest option for utilities.

The central conclusion of this just-released MIT study [PDF of the report summary] will not surprise regular Seekerblog readers: there is plenty of uranium and even more thorium, so there is no resource constraint on the rapid growth of nuclear power. I recommend reading the summary report carefully (the complete report chapters aren’t yet published on the web). For an overview, the MIT Energy Initiative press release is useful:

(…) Ernest J. Moniz, director of the MIT Energy Initiative and co-chair of the new study, says the report’s conclusion that uranium supplies will not limit growth of the industry runs contrary to the view that had prevailed for decades—one that guided decisions about which technologies were viable. “The failure to understand the extent of the uranium resource was a very big deal” for determining which fuel cycles were developed and the schedule of their development, he says.

The study concludes that a uranium-initiated breeder design with a unity conversion ratio of 1.0 is likely to be superior to higher-conversion-ratio designs (ratios of 1.2 to 1.3). That’s one of several new concepts for me:

The new study suggests an alternative: an enriched uranium-initiated breeder reactor in which additional natural or depleted (that is, a remnant of the enrichment process) uranium is added to the reactor core at the same rate nuclear materials are consumed. No excess nuclear materials are produced. This is a much simpler and more efficient self-sustaining fuel cycle.

One of prof. Fosberg’s CSIS presentation slides captures the uranium supply/demand picture succinctly:

Best estimate of 50% increase in uranium cost if:

• Nuclear power grows by a factor of 10 worldwide

• Each reactor operates for a century

I believe that the new MIT study is a “big deal” — it provides high-credibility backing to almost every nuclear fuel cycle concept that we have been proposing (such as preserving the enormous value of “waste” for future use as fuel cycle feedstock). Our job now is to motivate the politicians to adopt and implement the conclusions.

PS – I’m keen for Appendix A to be released “Thorium Fuel Cycle Options”.

One presentation caught my eye, by Dr. Clifford Singer of Univ. of Illinois. Excerpts from the summary emphasize the incentives — which seem to totally absent from all the existing law and regulation. Ensure there is competition among several states for storage operations:

Obtaining the cooperation of localities and states on siting spent nuclear fuel management facilities requires more than building trust with local communities. States having an appropriate site will view it as a valuable energy systems asset and will want financial compensation not at the level of a few percent, but measured in tenths of the cost of the entire project. If siting is really to be voluntary, it is important not to put a single state in a monopoly position of having the only licensed site. To do so will generate tension with the federal government over the level of financial benefit to the host state and within the host state over whether the final arrangement is equitable. There must be a sensible mechanism for compensating host states and a process that leads to more than one site being licensed and ready for use.

(…) Use of the Framework: Congress should set the maximum allowed Permanent Fund charges high enough to make hosting spent fuel management facilities something that several states desire rather than wish to avoid. A short list of geological repository sites in at least six states should lead to a competition to be amongst two or preferably three chosen for licensing. It is economically optimal to age spent fuel intact over a few of the c. 30 year half lives of its most intense fission product heat generators, before its final disposition. Thus, a similar number of spent fuel aging facilities should be licensed, some of which may be at repository sites. In this context spent fuel reprocessing will not be economically favorable for many decades, if ever. If a pilot scale reprocessing facility is nevertheless licensed, it should also be licensed as an indefinitely renewable aging facility, as no reprocessing facility anywhere has yet both operated as planned and removed all high-level radioactive materials from site.

If you are keen to know everything about Yucca Mountain, read BLDG BLOG: One Million Years Of Isolation: An Interview With Abraham Van Luik. Seekerblog isn’t much interested in Yucca Mountain because we now know that we do not want to “bury” the incredibly valuable asset of unburned nuclear fuel.

I found the link to the BLDG BLOG article on Stewart Brand’s Chapter 4 webpage. In stark contrast to the Yucca Mountain fiasco Canada has developed a sensible strategy for managing unburned nuclear fuel — again from Brand’s page:

A year after the Yucca trip, Global Business Network was invited to run a scenario workshop for Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization, which was conducting a series of meetings to explore what Canada should do with the waste from its twenty-two CANDU nuclear reactors.…

After eighty meetings across Canada, the nation’s nuclear waste policy emerged. It is based, says a report from the organization, on the principle of “Respect for Future Generations: we should not prejudge the needs and capabilities of the future. Rather than acting in a paternalistic way, we should leave the choice of what to do with the used fuel for them to determine.” Accordingly, Canada has an “adaptive phased management” plan, where the spent fuel remains in wet and dry storage at the reactor sites while a “near term” (1 to 175 years) centralized shallow underground facility is built, designed for easy retrieval; that will be followed by a deep geological repository for permanent storage. Future Canadians have options at every step. No mention is made of 10,000 years. The report does note that “during the 175-year period, the overall radioactivity of used fuel drops to one-billionth of the level when it was removed from the reactors.…”

Physicist Bernard Cohen is a go-to source on nuclear energy. His University of Pittsburgh page includes links to a number of papers, particularly those disproving the LNT Linear No Threshold hypothesis.