Some of the worst pork in the federal government hides under the shadow of obscurity. So it is with the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative, a Department of Energy program that’s gotten more than $260 million over the last five years. What is the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative? Ask a dozen members of Congress, and you’ll probably get little more than a dozen shrugs.

It turns out that the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative is the first step in the Department of Energy’s quiet campaign to reestablish a nuclear reprocessing program in the United States. The nuclear reprocessing idea, which was revived in the 2001 energy task force, has been a leading goal of the Department of Energy’s top brass over the past few years.
The only problem is that nuclear reprocessing is a fiscal and environmental mess.

This costly and complex procedure to separate uranium and plutonium from spent nuclear fuel is a relic of the Cold War. Today, it is mistakenly being touted as a way to deal with the nation’s nuclear waste problem – even though the Nuclear Energy Institute openly admits that the technology doesn’t cut down on the permanent waste storage capacity needed.

The program also raises serious proliferation concerns, which led both Presidents Ford and Carter to implement a policy against reprocessing. About 250 metric tons of plutonium from commercial reprocessing—equivalent to more than 30,000 nuclear bombs—has been separated globally, leaving it vulnerable to theft.

The U.S. has only had one commercial nuclear reprocessing facility in its history – the West Valley plant in New York, which operated in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s and was a complete disaster. After a series of problems, the plant closed in 1973 and left taxpayers with an estimated $8.3 billion clean-up job, which is still incomplete. More recently, other countries have gotten into the reprocessing act, with similar results. For example Japan is nearly finished constructing a reprocessing plant that cost a whopping $20 billion, more than three times what was originally expected.

Although the industry hasn’t pulled out its reprocessing pompoms just yet, they have never been one to shy away from a handout. And thus far, the government has obliged: the DOE’s reprocessing R&D program, the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative, just got $580 million in authorizations over three years in the new energy bill that was signed in August.

How has this bad idea traveled so far? Only by flying under the radar. Without any public hearing, language was inserted into the House Energy & Water Development appropriations bill that would require the DOE to develop a reprocessing plan by 2007. This is no way to deal with such a huge and costly endeavor: in 1999, DOE estimated that a variation of this program could cost the U.S. as much as $280 billion to implement. Although DOE has since retracted that estimate, they have refused to provide a new one.

Reprocessing is a radioactive idea, and it will only work with huge handouts from Uncle Sam. It’s about time someone shine a light on this boondoggle, because once construction of a reprocessing plant gets underway, we can kiss billions of our tax dollars goodbye.