Used fuel as a resource: managing the leftovers.

Designing, building and operating a nuclear reactor is a massive undertaking, fraught with complex issues of licensing, scheduling, funding, battling of naysayers and convincing of skeptics--all while keeping up with rapidly changing technology.

Once that task is accomplished and the plant is up and running, there remains the issue of what to do with the spent fuel--nuclear waste with a shelf life of hundreds of years. That's longer, in fact, than current storage methods can be guaranteed.

Spent fuel is a conundrum all its own. worthy of an entire subcommittee on the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, a federal agency created earlier this year "to conduct a comprehensive review of policies for managing the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle" and to provide recommendations for alternatives for storage, processing and disposal.

Clint Wolfe, executive director of Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness, a grass-roots organization in Aiken, S.C., testified at the Blue Ribbon Commission's Reactor and Fuel Cycle Technology subcommittee meeting in August. His expertise includes work at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico, Westinghouse's Research and Development Center and Service Technology Division, and the Savannah River Co. and the Savannah River National Laboratory. From his vantage point, the issue is less about technological capabilities than about government policy.

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"In 1976, [President] Gerald Ford issued an executive order that suspended work on all reprocessing out of concern for proliferation," Wolfe says. "When [President] Carter came in office, he extended the order and look away the funding. That put an end to the U.S.' involvement in reprocessing. Later, [President] Reagan rescinded the order, but he didn't put the money back."

Essentially, there is no policy against recycling the spent fuel. However, without government support, particularly funding, the spent fuel will have to be stored rather than reprocessed for additional use. Aside from finding appropriate and safe storage for nuclear waste. Wolfe says some feel it would be more efficient to reuse the spent fuel rather than continuing the once-through process currently in effect.

"There are places where spent fuel rods are stored, and they're safe and secure, and it's not urgent that we do anything about them," he says. "But in some locations, they'll eventually have to create more space for storage. In the meantime, the...