Debunking the claims about generation IV nuclear waste
Generation IV nuclear waste claims debunked, Nuclear Monitor 24 Sept 18 Lindsay Krall and Allison Macfarlane have written an important article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists debunking claims that certain Generation IV reactor concepts promise major advantages with respect to nuclear waste management. Krall is a post-doctoral fellow at the George Washington University. Macfarlane is a professor at the same university, a former chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission from July 2012 to December 2014, and a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future from 2010 to 2012.
Krall and Macfarlane focus on molten salt reactors and sodium-cooled fast reactors, and draw on the experiences of the US Experimental Breeder Reactor II and the US Molten Salt Reactor Experiment.
The article abstract notes that Generation IV developers and advocates “are receiving substantial funding on the pretense that extraordinary waste management benefits can be reaped through adoption of these technologies” yet “molten salt reactors and sodium-cooled fast reactors – due to the unusual chemical compositions of their fuels – will actually exacerbate spent fuel storage and disposal issues.”
Here is the concluding section of the article:
“The core propositions of non-traditional reactor
proponents – improved economics, proliferation resistance,
safety margins, and waste management – should be
re-evaluated. The metrics used to support the waste
management claims – i.e. reduced actinide mass and total
radiotoxicity beyond 300 years – are insufficient to critically
assess the short- and long-term safety, economics, and
proliferation resistance of the proposed fuel cycles.
“Furthermore, the promised (albeit irrelevant) actinide
reductions are only attainable given exceptional
technological requirements, including commercial-scale
spent fuel treatment, reprocessing, and conditioning
facilities. These will create low- and intermediate-level
waste streams destined for geologic disposal, in addition
to the intrinsic high-level fission product waste that will
also require conditioning and disposal.
“Before construction of non-traditional reactors begins,
the economic implications of the back end of these nontraditional
fuel cycles must be analyzed in detail; disposal
costs may be unpalatable. The reprocessing/treatment
and conditioning of the spent fuel will entail costs, as will
storage and transportation of the chemically reactive fuels.
These are in addition to the cost of managing high-activity
operational wastes, e.g. those originating from molten
salt reactor filter systems. Finally, decommissioning the
reactors and processing their chemically reactive coolants
represents a substantial undertaking and another source
of non-traditional waste. …
“Issues of spent fuel management (beyond temporary
storage in cooling pools, aka “wet storage”) fall outside
the scope of the NRC’s reactor design certification
process, which is regularly denounced by nuclear
advocates as narrowly applicable to light water reactor
technology and insufficiently responsive to new reactor
designs. Nevertheless, new reactor licensing is contingent
on broader policies, including the Nuclear Waste Policy
Act and the Continued Storage Rule. Those policies are
based on the results of radionuclide dispersion models
described in environmental impact statements. But the
fuel and barrier degradation mechanisms tested in these
models were specific to oxide-based spent fuels, which
are inert, compared to the compounds that non-traditional
reactors will discharge.
“The Continued Storage Rule explicitly excludes most
non-oxide fuels, including those from sodium-cooled fast
reactors, from the environmental impact statement. Clearly,
storage and disposal of non-oxide commercial fuels should
require updated assessments and adjudication.
“Finally, treatment of spent fuels from non-traditional
reactors, which by Energy Department precedent is
only feasible through their respective (re)processing
technologies, raises concerns over proliferation and fissile
material diversion. Pyroprocessing and fluoride volatilityreductive
extraction systems optimized for spent fuel
treatment can – through minor changes to the chemical
conditions – also extract plutonium (or uranium 233 bred
from thorium). Separation from lethal fission products
would eliminate the radiological barriers protecting the
fuel from intruders seeking to obtain and purify fissile
material. Accordingly, cost and risk assessments of
predisposal spent fuel treatments must also account for
proliferation safeguards.
“Radioactive waste cannot be “burned”; fission of
actinides, the source of nuclear heat, inevitably generates
fission products. Since some of these will be radiotoxic
for thousands of years, these high-level wastes should
be disposed of in stable waste forms and geologic
repositories. But the waste estimates propagated by
nuclear advocates account only for the bare mass of
fission products, rather than that of the conditioned waste
form and associated repository requirements.
“These estimates further assume that the efficiency
of actinide fission will surge, but this actually relies on
several rounds of recycling using immature reprocessing
technologies. The low- and intermediate-level wastes
that will be generated by these activities will also be
destined for geologic disposal but have been neglected
in the waste estimates. More important, reprocessing
remains a security liability of dubious economic benefit,
so the apparent need to adopt these technologies simply
to prepare non-traditional spent fuels for storage and
disposal is a major disadvantage relative to light water
reactors. Theoretical burnups for fast and molten salt
reactors are too low to justify the inflated back-end costs
and risks, the latter of which may include a commercial
path to proliferation.
“Reductions in spent fuel volume, longevity, and total
radiotoxicity may be realized by breeding and burning
fissile material in non-traditional reactors. But those
relatively small reductions are of little value in repository
planning, so utilization of these metrics is misleading to
policy-makers and the general public. We urge policymakers
to critically assess non-traditional fuel cycles,
including the feasibility of managing their unusual waste
streams, any loopholes that could commit the American
public to financing quasi-reprocessing operations, and
the motivation to rapidly deploy these technologies. If
decarbonization of the economy by 2050 is the end-goal,
a more pragmatic path to success involves improvements
to light water reactor technologies, adoption of Blue
Ribbon Commission recommendations on spent fuel
management, and strong incentives for commercially
mature, carbon-free energy technologies.”
Lindsay Krall and Allison Macfarlane, 2018, ‘Burning
waste or playing with fire? Waste management
considerations for non-traditional reactors’, Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists, 74:5, pp.326-334, https://tandfonline.
com/doi/10.1080/00963402.2018.1507791
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