Roundtable: new strategies for advanced nuclear fuel cycles

The shadow cast over this after-dinner discussion was clearly the issue of global warming, and after some brief but poignantly cautionary remarks by moderator Sig Hecker (director emeritus of Los Alamos National Laboratory), panelists Burton Richter, Chaim Braun, and M.R. Srinivasan each further shaded that shadow based on his own perspective. But in all cases, the panel’s overall thrust was unambiguous. Given the world’s burgeoning energy needs, the limited fossil-fuel supply, and the probable reality of greenhouse gas effects on the environment, nuclear power should form a key component of the planet’s energy future.

Speaking first was Richter, of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He took the historical path, hearkening back to President Carter’s “once-through” fuel strategy, one that according to the Carter presidential library documents would have been abandoned had he been elected to a second term. When viewed against the fact that the United States has not ordered a new nuclear reactor for several decades, Richter’s thrust was clear: the once-through fuel cycle is a dead end, one requiring enormous spent-fuel repository capacity even were the United States to not expand nuclear-energy-generating capacity beyond its existing array of more than 100 reactors.

Clearly advocating for spent-fuel reprocessing and actinide transmutation in fast-spectrum reactors, Richter estimated that one of the latter for every seven to eight light-water reactors would be sufficient for U.S. needs.

Returning to reality, Richter emphasized that no proliferation-proof fuel cycle exists, and therefore, he advocated internationalizing the fuel cycle (as in the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, or GNEP), with nuclear nations delivering leased fuel via “just-in-time” delivery and retrieval of spent fuel, which would then be reprocessed. In this scheme, so-called “supplier states” would enrich uranium, recover spent fuel, reprocess the spent fuel to separate actinides, then burn the actinides in the fast-spectrum reactors.

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