U.S. and Japan sign nuclear power pact

The Bush administration’s plan to rapidly expand global nuclear energy took a key step Wednesday when the government signed an agreement with Japan to conduct joint research on a new generation of reactors and a new type of nuclear fuel.

The Energy Department has been pushing an ambitious but controversial agenda to build a fleet of nuclear power plants worldwide, based on prospective technology that would include reprocessing radioactive wastes.

The agreement with Japan is the first formal international deal under the program, known as the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.

The program would make the U.S. a more important player in the worldwide nuclear building boom, in which 222 new reactors are planned, said Assistant Energy Secretary Dennis Spurgeon.

“That is $1 trillion of business on the horizon,” he said.

But many nuclear energy experts are lukewarm to the proposition, saying it seeks to solve complex future problems even before the U.S. can fully address the existing questions involved in restarting nuclear power plant construction.

“Some kind of nuclear nirvana is the driving force behind this,” said Victor Gilinsky, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “It has a certain intellectual appeal until you think about how it would work and what it would cost.”

The program got strong backing from congressional Republicans, but the new Democratic leaders say it is going forward without proper authorization.

“To date, there has been very little congressional input to and oversight of this plan,” Senate Energy Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) said in a statement to The Times. “I look forward to having a hearing in the Energy Committee to learn more.”

The idea of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel dates back decades. But it has long been rejected because reprocessing it is so expensive and environmentally messy.

The National Research Council said in a mid-1990s study that reprocessing existing U.S. commercial waste by so-called transmutation would cost more than $100 billion and take more than a century.

Spurgeon, a former nuclear industry executive, said newer technology could reprocess waste at a much lower cost.

The administration is seeking a major expansion of nuclear power as a way to reduce production of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

The U.S. is considering about 30 possible applications for new commercial reactors, all based on conventional technology that uses enriched uranium as the only fuel.

Under the global partnership program, a new generation of breeder reactors would burn reprocessed fuel that is currently stored at power plants.

In theory, the global nuclear proposal would help reduce the amount of nuclear waste in the U.S. while enabling other countries to develop nuclear energy without risk of weapons proliferation.

Even if the proposed nuclear waste dump at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain gets past political opposition, its capacity of 70,000 metric tons would be almost entirely spoken for on the day it opened. Reprocessing would sharply reduce the amount of waste destined for Yucca Mountain and make room for future waste from a bigger industry.

But that would leave behind tons of highly radioactive cesium and strontium that would have to be stored somewhere for the next several hundred years, creating yet another political problem, according to such critics as Robert Alvarez, who worked in the Energy Department during the Clinton administration.

“They are making this up as they go along,” Alvarez said.

The global partnership plan is based partly on the premise that the U.S. could ultimately sell reactor fuel in the international market and import back the radioactive waste for reprocessing.

Congressional critics say that prospect alone raises serious political obstacles.

The intent is to allow a large number of countries to have commercial nuclear power industries but not the facilities that could enrich uranium and thus produce materials for nuclear weapons, Spurgeon said.

ralph.vartabedian @latimes.com