David Deese and Frederick Williams

Publisher Summary

This chapter discusses the legal, institutional, and political aspects of managing spent fuel internationally. Environmentalists, industrialists, and government officials in most nations with nuclear power programs agree that the accumulation of large quantities of spent fuel on nuclear reactor sites presents a pressing problem. The environmentalists fear that interim storage facilities at reactor sites will become longer-term dumping grounds, thus, removing the pressure to solve the waste disposal problem. Nuclear utilities have trouble running existing power stations where spent fuel storage pools are reaching capacity; it is difficult to obtain licenses for new stations because no one knows how to dispose of future spent fuel. Government officials cannot confidently include nuclear power in future energy plans because the confusion surrounding spent fuel disposition impedes new construction. These spent fuel management problems are most severe in countries that have many nuclear power reactors. If a new facility for fuel storage is not built on the site of an existing nuclear power or reprocessing plant, getting spent fuel to it will require an extra transport leg.

INTRODUCTION

In a few decades at most, the technology of nuclear waste disposal will be sufficiently developed to allow the world’s nations to agree on whether they should jettison spent nuclear fuel directly and permanently, or reprocess it for reuse. In the meantime, some nations are aggressively pursuing reprocessing, while others are cautiously deferring or rejecting it. Even the most optimistic advocates of reprocessing believe that inventories of unreprocessed spent fuel are accumulating beyond the level that reprocessing plants will be able to handle.

Environmentalists, industrialists, and government officials in most nations with nuclear power programs agree that the accumulation of large quantities of spent fuel on nuclear reactor sites presents a pressing problem. The environmentalists fear that interim storage facilities at reactor sites will become longer-term dumping grounds, thus removing the pressure to solve the waste disposal problem. Nuclear utilities have trouble running existing power stations where spent fuel storage pools are reaching capacity; and it is difficult to obtain licenses for new stations because no one knows how to dispose of future spent fuel. Government officials cannot confidently include nuclear power in future energy plans because the confusion surrounding spent fuel disposition impedes new construction. And all three groups worry that large concentrations of spent fuel will attract terrorist attacks.

These spent fuel management problems are most severe in countries that have many nuclear power reactors. Even so, India already has a spent fuel storage problem and soon other countries with small nuclear programs will share this difficulty. For most nuclear countries, disposition of spent reactor fuel will become an important national and international issue in the 1980s and 1990s. Some institution – private, national, or international – will have to absorb substantial amounts of spent fuel without overburdening national reactor programs.

This accumulation of spent reactor fuel presents yet another problem. Evidence from the United States, Britain, France, West Germany, Sweden, Japan, and elsewhere demonstrates that, unless other reasonable options are available, spent fuel accumulation, in and of itself, can be a powerful driving force toward national reprocessing. To have large quantities of spent fuel accumulating worldwide, especially in countries without immediate plans for overseas reprocessing or direct disposal, will seriously complicate international efforts to check the spread of nuclear weapons.

If future reprocessing for all countries occurs exclusively in the Soviet Union, the United States, France, Britain, West Germany, and Japan, part of the reason for centralized spent fuel storage evaporates. Reprocessing has already begun in Argentina, Belgium (Eurochemic), Taiwan, India, Italy, and Spain, and is firmly planned in several other nations, including Brazil and Pakistan. National reprocessing plants, with the accompanying threat of atomic weapons fabrication, may soon be dispersed worldwide. If the countries with spent nuclear fuel could develop an internationally controlled system for handling their growing wastes, nuclear energy could have the raw material it needs to expand without stimulating the further spread of plutonium reprocessing capabilities.

Four general categories of countries emerge on the basis of their plans for national reprocessing:(1) 1) The United States, the Soviet Union, France, Britain, West Germany, and Japan are primary nuclear reprocessing countries and countries planning to store foreign spent fuel; 2) Argentina, Brazil, Belgium, India, Italy, Pakistan, Spain and Taiwan are countries with small reprocessing facilities or with plans to construct reprocessing plants; 3) Countries such as Iran and Mexico have no firm present plans, but many decide to reprocess in the future; and 4) Countries such as Austria and Switzerland are unlikely to reprocess in the foreseeable future.

Even countries that build their own reprocessing plants may find economic, political, and institutional advantages in joining a centralized spent fuel storage arrangement. They may also find that it increases regional security. Most countries, however, will participate only if guaranteed that they can retrieve and reprocess the fuel at any time.

Countries that temporarily relinquish their control over spent fuel to an international facility may make demands. They may request additional military assistance to compensate for the atomic weapons they have forsaken, or they may ask for faster reductions in the arsenals of the nuclear weapons states. Certainly if international spent fuel storage is to attract nations – for example, Argentina, Brazil, India, and Pakistan – that already possess all or most of the facilities needed to build nuclear weapons, the prestige of nuclear weapons must be decreased. Some specific areas for progress in this direction include achieving a comprehensive nuclear weapons test ban, reaching agreement in ongoing strategic arms limitation talks and commitments to go further in the future, ceasing production of all new nuclear weapons-grade materials, and opening all nuclear facilities – except nuclear weapons state military production plants – to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, Austria.

PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS

The feasibility of international spent fuel management hinges upon four principal issues.