The federal government’s nuclear-waste management program has proven to be a big waste of time and money, says the Heritage Foundation’s Jack Spencer in a recent paper. Washington has “spent billions of dollars without opening a repository, has yet to receive any waste, and is amassing billions of dollars of taxpayer liability.”
Well, yeah, but how does that distinguish the nuclear-waste program from all the other boondoggles embedded in the federal budget? Actually, there is a distinction: while other programs have worthy goals but poor execution or program design, this program doesn’t even have a worthy goal. The notion that we ought to have been building a huge hole in the ground to store all our spent fuel rods is foolish, a leftover from misplaced Carter-era concerns about proliferation. There’s a better way:
The current U.S. policy is to dispose of all spent fuel permanently. This is a monumental waste of resources. To create power, reactor fuel must contain 3 percent to 5 percent enriched fissionable uranium (uranium-235). Once the enriched uranium falls below that level, the fuel must be replaced. Yet this “spent” fuel generally retains about 95 percent of its original content, and that uranium, along with other byproducts in the spent fuel, can be recovered and recycled.
Many technologies exist to recover and recycle different parts of the spent fuel. The French have most successfully commercialized a process. They remove the uranium and plutonium and fabricate new fuel. Using that method, America’s 56,000 tons of used fuel stored across the nation contains roughly enough energy to power every U.S. household for 12 years.