Accelerator Transmutation of N-Waste

Volume One -

1980-1984-

Originally published in paperback as "Getting

The Shaft, The Radioactive Waste Controversy in Manitoba."

Volume Two -

update: 1984-1988-

The growing prospect of nuclear waste dumps on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border intensifies the controversy

Volume Three -

update:1988-1998

Federal Environmental Panel concludes that Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.'s permanent underground nuclear waste burial concept lacks public acceptability.

Volume Four -

update:1998-2008

Mixed Oxide plutonium transport and the Nuclear Waste Management Organization and

nuclear waste issue grinds on

Nuclear Waste Saga

The waste would soon be out of sight, out of mind, a situation which could facilitate the development of more nuclear energy. Or so the nuclear establishment thought.

Even the U.S. National Research Council in a 1996 study presented a rather lukewarm analysis of ATW. That study concluded that the state of the art of any transmutation process was insufficient to justify a delay in the opening of the first nuclear waste repository. (That U.S. repository, still under development at Yucca Mountain, Nevada in 2009, has not only been seriously delayed anyway, but may never be completed.

As for Canada, the nuclear establishment was not involved with ATW research and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Review Panel on Atomic Energy of Canada’s nuclear waste disposal “concept,” avoided ATW "like the plague."

Not only did the main scientific and nuclear establishments take a dim view of ATW, some of my favourite and most highly respected U.S. nuclear watchdog organizations, rendered rather harsh judgements of the technology.

In December, 1999, Amy Shollenberger, senior policy analyst for Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy Project said that The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) "... should not continue to spend money researching the Accelerator Transmutation of Waste (ATW) system because it will not offer a viable solution to the nuclear waste problem facing the United States."

In the March/April 2001, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Arjun Makhijani, President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), citing many scientific and technical problems, suggested that transmutation research had been "driven by political forces intent on propping up the nuclear power enterprise."

In a May 24, 2001 statement, Edwin Lyman, Scientific Director of the Washington based Nuclear Control Institute (NCI) said that "implementing DOE's ATW concept would vastly increase the

environmental, safety and proliferation risks from nuclear power, cost taxpayers a fortune and almost certainly fail to achieve its primary purpose, which is to simplify nuclear waste disposal.

The U.S. nuclear watchdog groups were, in part, reacting to Sen. Pete Domenici's,(R-N.M.), March, 1999 initiative to breath life into the fledgling ATW program, by securing funds for further research. In FY 1999, in the Energy and Water Appropriation Act, the U.S. Congress directed DOE to conduct a study of ATW and to prepare, a "road map" which would forecast needed research areas, time table, costs and schedule.

(As an aside, Domenici, also maintained that ATW could be used for other purposes such as medical isotope production. This point takes on new meaning in the light of the current (2009) Atomic Energy of Canada isotope disruption fiasco brought about the leakage of heavy water from its reactor at Chalk River, Ontario. My research confirms that ATW scientists often pointed out that the process could yield significant quantities of medical isotopes for diagnosis and treatment purposes).

The ATW road map, released November 1, 1999, with considerable international scientific input, described in detail, a five year, $281 million project. By July, 2001, DOE's advanced accelerator application (AAA) grants were being distributed to some of the major U.S. universities.

Why, in 1999, did ATW suddenly emerge from it's position of relative obscurity?

The simple explanation is that it was now being clearly linked to facilitating the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository program and to the future of nuclear energy.

As stated in the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) news release " If ATW technology could be successfully implemented to overcome all technical issues, it could potentially facilitate the long-term management of a repository system." And in the words of DOE official, Dr. Stan O Schriber, "ATW holds the promise of making nuclear power more acceptable to the general populace by minimizing the amount of material that has to be stored in a repository and by reducing the length of time over which a geologic repository must be licensed."

(As for the length of time, in one of his reports, Los Alamos scientist Francesco Venneri stated that "The goal of the ATW nuclear subsystem is to produce three orders of magnitude reduction in the long-term radio toxicity of the waste sent to a repository, including losses through processing. If the goal is met, the radio toxicity of ATW-treated waste after 300 years would be less than that of untreated waste after 100,000 years.")

The DOE and the U.S. nuclear industry underground burial advocates have neatly coopted ATW to their own ends. They have concluded that some day they might need it to help them justify and sell Yucca Mountain as well as more nuclear energy development to a skeptical U.S. public.

It seems that the nuclear energy and underground waste burial advocates will stop at nothing to get their waste repository "down and running."

Why should the public more readily accept the nuclear garbage dump, simply because it is augmented by a 5 year ATW research project? Suppose the ATW research does not pan out? Then, the repository, full of dangerous nuclear waste and plutonium, would eventually be sealed up with all of the risks that would entail.

Even Canada’s (industry dominated) Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) weighed in on the issue.

In its final report, it rejected ATW, blithely ignoring some of the facts presented to it by its own consultants. It dismissed the ATW option of transmuting nuclear waste to low-grade

or even inert substances because it "...is not yet sufficiently advanced for implementation and long-term management of the residual materials would still be required." It cites a report from French nuclear authorities that "industrial implementation of transmutation cannot be seen until the years 2040-2050 at best."

And yet, NWMO is perfectly willing to wait some three hundred years before a dubious underground repository is permanently closed.

But, in NWMO Background Paper: 6.5 Technical Methods: Range of Potential Options for the Long-Term Management of Used Nuclear Fuel, by Phil Richardson & Marion Hill, Enviros Consulting, it is stated that "It is recognized internationally that the possibility that P&T (partitioning and transmutation) could become a readily available and very attractive treatment option in several decades time, (and) could be a reason for choosing storage rather than disposal." (Italics supplied)

Furthermore, in NWMO Background Paper: 6-1 Technical Methods: Status of Reactor Site Storage Systems for Used Nuclear Fuel, by SENES Consultants Limited, it is stated that the dry storage facilities of irradiated fuel at Canada's nuclear power sites currently have a design life of 50 years and that "...the actual life of dry storage containers is thought to be 100 years or more."

Put two and two together, and you have a compelling case for continued on-site storage, with augmented security, coupled with some serious research and development into transmutation technologies, (which to my knowledge, no one in Canada is pursuing).

I've referred to some of the risks of underground burial throughout the first three volumes of the Great Canadian Nuclear Waste Saga. One of the greatest concerns now, is that reactor-grade plutonium, including that produced by the "burning" of MOX (weapons plutonium) fuel, would be sitting in nice, neat underground vaults, just waiting for extraction by future terrorists, rogue states or other disaffected members of society.

Reactor grade plutonium can be used to manufacture a crude but highly destructive nuclear weapon. Other concerns about a repository include nuclear waste transportation accidents, human intrusion, repository failure and environmental contamination, stemming from a wide variety of possible causes.

ATW should not be used as an adjunct to an underground repository program, to help promote future nuclear energy development.

I believe that ATW research should proceed on it's own merits, it's main purpose being a clear determination as to whether or not the technology can safely eliminate plutonium and high-level nuclear waste without the need for additional management processes, i.e., underground repositories.

I understand the concerns of the anti-nuclear organizations. I realize that any scenario that removes nuclear waste as a “problem” for the industry could lead to a shift in public perceptions, which would benefit its reactor expansion hopes and dreams. Perhaps. But I still would prefer to see the waste destroyed rather than buried to the potential detriment of future generations.

I like the statement in a 1991 New York Times article on ATW to the effect that there are both skeptics and proponents: The Times quotes Dr. Van Tuyle of the Brookhaven Laboratory who declared that "Transmutation is practical. No one really disputes that," he said. "Of course there are difficulties in applying it to a full-scale operation. But the problem of high-level radioactive waste won't go away. We are obliged to find and implement long-term solutions. We have to think of our remote descendants as well as our children and grandchildren."

Currently, it is difficult to determine just how much progress, if any, is being made on ATW technology. My internet searches in 2008-09 revealed very little contemporary information on the subject. I know that some work is going on in various universities and laboratories, such as the University of Nevada. But I get the distinct impression that the "hell bent for underground burial establishment" effectively put ATW back on the sidelines, at least for now.

However, times are changing. In the U.S. the Obama Administration has made drastic cuts to the 2009 federal budget for the on-going nuclear waste project at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. It is likely that the U.S. government will re-assess the entire nuclear waste program. Hopefully, it will take a new look at the potential of ATW to deal with the problem of the disposition of irradiated nuclear fuel waste.

Walt Robbins

Summer, 2009

Accelerator Transmutation of Nuclear Waste

Modern Day Alchemy

The idea of permanent underground burial of irradiated nuclear fuel wastes was best summed up by Dave Taylor of the Concerned Citizens of Manitoba organization. Calling it the “Outhouse Solution,” he described the process: “Dig a hole, bury the waste and cover it up.”

But I still have hopes that a truly scientific solution could be found to deal with nuclear waste. Could Accelerator Transmutation (ATW) be that solution?

In the final two chapters of volume III of the Great Canadian Nuclear Waste Saga (http://www.nukeshaft.ca), as a result of my e-mail contact with several of the key ATW scientific researchers, I included a number of references and comments about ATW technology. I argued that ATW should be investigated sufficiently to determine it's viability as an option for the final and permanent destruction of high-level nuclear waste and weapons grade plutonium.

ATW is a process in which long-lived radioisotopes are converted to short-lived ones and inert substances by neutron bombardment using a linear accelerator.

The process was well explained by a Professor Helmut Leeb from the Atomic Institute of the Austrian Universities. “The core concept of transmutation – which was formulated as early as mid 20th century – consists of irradiating the actinides by fast neutrons. The highly stimulated nuclei that are generated this way suffer a fission, which leads to relatively short-lived nuclei, which in turn rapidly disintegrate into stable isotopes. Then, they cease to be radioactive.”

For a variety of reasons, ATW was, for many years, relegated to the backwaters of scientific research. It did not emerge as a popular nuclear waste management option, either inside or outside of the nuclear establishment. The preferred option inside the establishment was (and is) clearly geological isolation.

In 1980, when I became involved in the underground research controversy in Manitoba, it was apparent that the problem of nuclear waste "disposal" had virtually become the exclusive domain of the geo-scientific community. Other scientific disciplines had been relegated to the sidelines. The underground burial advocates took control of substantial public resources and became the principle influence on public policy in nuclear waste generating countries.

Some of the early Canadian reports and studies I read, perfunctorily dismissed non-geological options (transmutation among them), and went on to extol the virtues (as well as to prejudge the success) of permanent geological isolation of nuclear waste.

That the geological option was seized upon by the world's nuclear establishment is easily explained in that it promised a relatively quick fix for the mounting stockpiles of irradiated nuclear fuel waste at the reactor sites. (It also demonstrates the human penchant for fouling ones own nest).

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