Barnwell victory sweet, but worse waste may be coming

Finally, South Carolina is no longer the nation's nuclear waste dumping ground. It was a long time coming, and hard fought, but the waste facility at Barnwell is now closed to all but three states.

While Barnwell's partial closure is great news for the environment and for public health, don't pause too long to savor this victory. More and deadlier waste will be coming our way if a scheme to store and process highly radioactive spent fuel goes forward.

The U.S. Department of Energy, along with companies like Barnwell-operator EnergySolutions and the state-owned French company AREVA, are aggressively pursuing a plan to store and "reprocess" nuclear waste from power plants all over the United States. The Department of Energy has expressed an interest in importing nuclear waste from other countries as well.

Reprocessing removes a small amount of plutonium from spent fuel — about 1 percent of the total volume — for possible use in nuclear power plants. Reprocessing also yields an enormous volume of additional radioactive waste — a toxic stew that must be forever isolated from the environment. Even more troubling, the separated plutonium mixture could be used by terrorists to make nuclear weapons.

South Carolina is the state most often mentioned as the site of a commercial reprocessing facility. That's because the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site was long-used to reprocess spent fuel to obtain plutonium for weapons, with the resultant high-level waste still be managed. Also, there's an adjacent property near Barnwell where a reprocessing facility was built in the 1970s, but never opened as sound non-proliferation policies implemented by Presidents Ford and Carter stopped it from operating.

It therefore makes perfect sense for boosters of commercial reprocessing to focus on South Carolina — as long as they don't personally have to finance the proposal or deal with the resultant hazardous wastes in the long-term.

As for the expense, reprocessing costs tens of billions of dollars more than other ways to manage nuclear waste. The cheapest way to address the problem of spent fuel is interim storage in sturdy "dry casks" stored on site. Also, the cost of using reprocessed plutonium in nuclear power plants is exorbitant – far more than the cost of using uranium fuel.

Further, reprocessing dramatically increases the risk that weapons-usable plutonium will be stolen, as well as the risk that workers and the environment will suffer contamination.

Finally, reprocessing actually increases the volume of nuclear waste "by a factor of twenty or more," according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. That's bad news for South Carolina residents, who know that once deadly radioactive waste is taken to an interim storage site, it may never leave. The site also becomes difficult to close, as we've seen in the decades-long Barnwell struggle.

Nuclear waste storage is a chronic problem in the United States because the facility targeted for permanent storage, Yucca Mountain in Nevada, has not opened and indeed may never open. Hurdles in meeting environmental standards could well be insurmountable, making licensing of the facility difficult at best.

Because it's been so difficult to find permanent storage for nuclear waste in the United States, proponents of reprocessing are now calling the process "recycling." That won't fool anyone in Europe, where reprocessing has proved to be environmentally and economically disastrous.

In France, literally thousands of tons of contaminated uranium, a byproduct of reprocessing, has accumulated as nuclear waste. At the same time, the national electricity company, Electricité de France, is tired of bearing the economic burden of being forced to take plutonium from AREVA, the state-owned reprocessing company, and is trying to back away from the obligations forced on it by the French government.

As patience with reprocessing wears thin in France, AREVA is now trying to take advantage of funding for reprocessing being considered by the U.S. Congress. Last April, in a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, AREVA said that "several states and communities have asked AREVA to site a recycling center in their jurisdictions. We are therefore seriously considering a commercial U.S. facility." In late June, the House Appropriations Committee approved $120 million for reprocessing research.

Clearly, the United States needs to accelerate the search for safe, permanent storage of nuclear waste. In the meantime, the safest and most cost-effective alternative is on-site interim storage in sturdy "dry casks." As for reprocessing, it's a dumb and dangerous idea that should be rejected by South Carolinians and the nation as a whole.

Tom Clements, based in Columbia, is the Southeastern Nuclear Campaign coordinator for the international environmental organization Friends of the Earth.