A Technology We Don’t Need

While the U.S. government seeks on one hand to halt the global spread of nuclear technology, on the other it continues to experiment with a process that would produce further stores of potentially dangerous uranium and plutonium. Never mind that the government already is struggling to find ways to dispose of 50 tons of excess military plutonium stockpiled in Colorado, Idaho, Washington, Texas, New Mexico and South Carolina.

Congress has an opportunity to halt this highly dubious enterprise by killing a proposed $50-million appropriation to the Department of Energy for the “pyroprocessing” of spent nuclear fuel into uranium and plutonium. The DOE budget is scheduled for key votes in the Congress during the next two weeks.

Pyroprocessing is a method that involves burning waste fuel at high temperatures and separating out usable uranium and plutonium by electroplating. The work is conducted in Idaho by the Argonne-West Laboratory of the University of Chicago. The process was being developed in conjunction with a plutonium breeder reactor that was to serve as a prototype for commercial power production. But the breeder reactor was canceled by the Department of Energy in 1994 because it would have undercut U.S. efforts to discourage other countries from plutonium reprocessing. To placate members of Congress from Illinois and Idaho, the department continued with the pyroprocessing experiment under the mantle of nuclear waste management and disposal.

Critics say that once the breeder reactor was canceled, pyroprocessing lost its only customer and became “a technology in search of a mission.” Four distinguished scientists, including professor emeritus James C. Warf of USC, have written the House Appropriations Committee that pyroprocessing would itself create a new type of highly radioactive waste, with new problems of disposal.

Most important, however, pyroprocessing creates unneeded high-level nuclear products and thus increases the risk of nuclear proliferation. This is not something the government should be financing in 1997.