U.S. plan for nuclear cartel faces reality check

Potential for world changing ‘payoff’
As for GNEP's high costs, he said, "We recognize the government has a role and a responsibility to invest in basic research. If it works, the payoff will be many times greater than the investment. ... It can literally change economies around the world."

At the September hearing on GNEP, Lyman and Bunn's objections were quickly brushed aside by Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., one of the biggest backers of the nuclear industry in Congress and the fuel reprocessing program's chief proponent.

Domenici, then chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water, charged that Bunn “isn't living in the same age I am with reference to support for nuclear power. He's still talking about things like we need (political) support for certain things, where I already think the nation is far ahead of that.”

Domenici's staff refused MSNBC.com's requests for an interview with the senator.

But GNEP has not been as warmly embraced by other members of Congress, and the $250 million sought by the Bush administration to begin work on the program is snarled in an appropriations battle.

Nor has the nuclear industry been a strong supporter, though that could be changing because of the program’s perceived potential to solve some of the issues surrounding nuclear waste disposal.

“I support GNEP as a responsible solution to addressing our spent fuel needs,” Domenici said at the outset of the September hearing. He has since introduced legislation that would “integrate” Yucca Mountain and GNEP to allow waste to bypass Yucca and be sent to a holding facility if “the secretary of energy determines if it can be recycled within a reasonable amount of time.”

New interest in waste implications
The waste-handling implications caught the attention of Nevada's Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, now the Senate majority leader and a staunch foe of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump. At the hearing, Reid said he was “pleased that we're taking another look at the administration's GNEP plan and pleased to see that we're looking particularly at the waste recycling portion of the plan.”

The Nuclear Energy Institute, nuclear power’s chief lobbying group, is showing new interest in GNEP after initially expressing concerns that the plan’s potential for overreaching could stymie near-term plans for new reactors. As recently as July, NEI President Skip Bowman called GNEP “a distraction factor” on the waste issue and an NEI policy paper in August noted that viable reprocessing technologies are “decades away.”

But in December, NEI spokesman Scott Peterson told MSNBC.com that there had been "a bit of a shift" in industry thinking on GNEP’s implications for the waste problem. “It’s not a shift away from a repository," he said. "But what I think it does recognize is the need we’re going to have for new fuel from the 30 reactors we’re going to have." And "you will need some definite movement toward the DOE taking (spent) fuel from plant sites," to dispose of it, as it is legally obligated to do, for U.S. nuclear expansion to proceed.

Echoing the Domenici bill, the GNEP strategy released Jan. 10 notes that "once the nuclear fuel recycling center is approved to accept spent fuel, shipments of (spent) fuel could begin from utilities, which would be a significant step in providing confidence in our nation’s ability to meet its nuclear waste management responsibilities.”

Asked by MSNBC.com if such shipments could lead to a GNEP site becoming a nuclear waste dump if plans for a “recycling reactor” don’t pan out, Spurgeon said no.

Not a ‘de facto permanent repository’
"We're not talking about interim storage … that would have it morph into a de facto permanent repository,” he said during a conference call to unveil the strategy document. And he pledged that the Department of Energy would seek licensing from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its projects, even if not legally required to do so.

Such discussion has led some anti-nuclear activists in Piketon to charge that GNEP is a "secret plan" by DOE to turn the old Portsmouth plant into "a giant dump for commercial spent fuel,” breaking the Yucca logjam and allowing more nuclear reactors to be built.

But the Southern Ohio Neighbors Group will fight the plan regardless, said Geoffrey Sea, a member of the group and a neighbor of the Piketon site.

Sea called it “an abomination to even consider this place” for GNEP projects for a number of cultural and environmental reasons and confidently predicted that the project will never happen. “It’s very clear that the new Congress is going to kill GNEP,” he said.

But Simonton, the Piketon civic leader, said his group would not advocate anything that is unsafe. “The true community leaders understand that taking a look at something makes sense,” he said. “Finding out more information is never a harmful process as far as we’re concerned.”

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