Green Scissors 2003 Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative

"This is a lot of money to wager on the successful completion of such an extremely complex enterprise, especially when the net gain calculation is based on uncertain economic and technical assumptions."

Kazimi et al. A Review of the LANL Project on Accelerator-Driven Transmutation of Waste (ATW), Massachusetts

Institute of Technology, February 20, 1998

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has expanded its dubious quest to reduce the toxicity and volume of nuclear waste. The Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative (AFCI) combines particle accelerators, new types of nuclear reactors, and a nuclear fuel reprocessing technology known as "pyroprocessing." Pyroprocessing is a vestige of the nuclear breeder reactor program killed by Congress in 1994. The DOE continues to throw money at reprocessing spent nuclear fuel in the U.S., despite the fact that reprocessing is too expensive to commercialize and increases the threat of spent commercial fuel to the environment. This program also counters a long-standing U.S. policy, established under the Ford administration, which prohibits reprocessing spent fuel because of nuclear proliferation risks.

Green Scissors Proposal

Terminate the AFCI program, saving at least $315 million over the next five years.

Current Status

In February 2003, Congress appropriated $58 million for this program - three times the amount requested by DOE. The administration request for fiscal year 2004 is $63 million. While the program continues to grow, the DOE has yet to provide a cost-estimate or timeline for completion. The House energy bill, passed on April 11, 2003, authorizes $399 million to this program over the next four years, while the Senate energy bill currently authorizes $860 million over five years.

Project Hurts Taxpayers

The capital outlays for AFCI are outrageously large. In 1999, DOE estimated that this program alone could cost the United States as much as $280 billion to implement over 118 years. While DOE has retracted that estimate, it has yet to provide any new calculation of how much this risky experiment will cost taxpayers.

This concept includes technologies that are uncompetitive and will prove very costly to taxpayers. Proponents have compared the cost of this program to sodium breeder reactor technologies, which were terminated because they were uncompetitive. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development suggests that employing spent fuel treatment and transmutation on a commercial scale would add at least ten percent to the overall cost of electricity.

This project is corporate welfare. If this were an economically feasible method of dealing with nuclear waste, the nuclear industry would develop it on its own.

Project Hurts the Environment

DOE acknowledges that the project will not obviate the need for a repository. Far from solving the nuclear waste problem, these messy and expensive processes to extract plutonium from irradiated nuclear fuel create difficult-to-manage radioactive waste streams of their own.

Pyroprocessing increases the risk of nuclear proliferation. A National Academy of Sciences report, commissioned by DOE, explained that the process "could be redirected to produce material with nuclear detonation capability." The report also raised questions about interim storage of the waste streams and other aspects of pyroprocessing.

Contacts

Navin Nayak, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, (202) 546-9707
Ed Lyman, Union of Concerned Scientists, (202) 223-6133
Lisa Gue, Public Citizen, (202) 546-4996




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