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[cdn-nucl-l] Re: [MbrExchange] Recycle spent fuel
Jim:
I concur. Sign me up for the educational effort.
Rod
In a message dated 8/18/05 4:30:14 PM, jimm@WPI.EDU writes:
Friends,
This message is becoming clearer all the time. Domenici and Reid have indicated that they can work together to promote nuclear power and get Yucca Mountain off the political agenda!
The energy bill and future nuclear power agenda “requires” us to rethink spent fuel management and disposal, and YM, which is not large enough for the current plants anyway, and would not help the question of building more plants if the issue became “where will you site the next YM?” The current plants can no longer push for YM to preclude dry cask storage.
If YM were through NRC licensing today, the legal and political problems facing new nuclear power plants would be greater, not reduced.
We need to work with gov’t and internationally, to have a policy of dry storage pending future decisions when new nuclear plants and clean coal and wind power and other alternatives can establish the long term basis for spent fuel treatment and disposal, while letting the fuel cool to be disposed of with less heat in the repository, and after rationalizing the political and technical requirements for disposal.
Regards, Jim Muckerheide
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Texas think-tank wants U.S. to recycle nuclear waste
Aug. 17 -- Analysts for the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based think-tank, are recommending the United States begins recycling its spent nuclear fuel rods.
Recycling the rods would extend their life and reduce the amount of waste that would need to be shipped to and stored at the planned Yucca Mountain repository near Las Vegas.
The analysts for NCPA, a nonprofit research group that advocates alternatives to government regulation, maintain that adopting a fuel recycling program would reduce controversy surrounding the construction of the waste repository in Nevada.
"Spent nuclear rods are not waste and can be reused," said H. Sterling Burnett, an NCPA senior fellow. France, which gets 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants, already recycles its used fuel, he said.