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• Position: Letter to the Editor

Nuclear Power Plants

As a life member of NDIA and a past Chairman of the Nuclear Engineering Division of ASME, I was pleased to see the story on nuclear power entitled "Energy Department Optimistic About Resurgence of Nuclear Power," in the September 2001 issue of "National Defense". The story, on page 14, described the current state of nuclear power very well. The potential of new reactor designs is also presented in a positive light. It is the discussion of nuclear waste and the handling of spent fuel that raises questions in my mind.

First of all, a radiation dose is not measured in milligrams but in millirems. This is an error in fact.

Secondly, I and many others in the industry believe that using natural gas, a transportable fuel, for generating electricity is a waste of a limited resource, and burning any hydrocarbon fuel leads to the release of carbon dioxide into the environment.

Finally, spent fuel is described incorrectly as waste. The remaining available energy content in the spent fuel is many times the small amount that has been extracted. The fuel should be reprocessed, as it is in other parts of the world. I participated in studies at Battelle in the 1970's that showed that the fuel can be reprocessed in such a way that the vast majority of the long-lived fission products, including the transuranic materials, such as plutonium, can be recycled and successfully used as a new reactor fuel material. These studies were lead by Dr. William Madia, who is now the director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This requires no new technology, but just a commitment to do it. These materials would protect the plutonium because, they remain highly radioactive. Prefabrication of fuel would be done as a remote operation, and the fuel would be returned to the reactors in the same shipping containers that would be used to rake the depleted fuel to the reprocessing plant. The residual waste ma terial would have, for the most, part a half life of less then 100 years and thus would require isolation for about 1,000 years.

It is time that we addressed the spent fuel as a resource rather then a waste. It is not an environmentally sound approach to use about 10 to 15 percent of the energy available from the uranium, and then call the remainder of it waste...