In December, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors voted to explore sending the nuclear waste from the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station to a Department of Energy facility — currently nonexistent — for “reprocessing,” an industrial process that dissolves the waste and separates it into different components.
This waste — immensely radioactive spent uranium fuel rods — is now stored at the site of the former nuclear reactor, a mere 100 feet from the ocean and 18 inches above groundwater.
The communities near the waste have been understandably eager to see it removed, and the supervisors deserve credit for recognizing the urgency of the situation and seeking solutions. But reprocessing is a false solution and is unlikely to result in the timely removal of the San Onofre waste.
Our organizations have each spent many years offering independent technical analysis and public advocacy for the responsible, safe management of nuclear waste, both at San Onofre and nationally. We feel an obligation to point out the simple truth: reprocessing takes a bad problem and makes it much worse.
Reprocessing advocates often refer to it as nuclear waste “recycling,” which sounds nice — who doesn’t like recycling? But the reality is not so rosy: reprocessing is dangerous, dirty, and expensive.
Reprocessing does not eliminate nuclear waste. It creates larger volumes of waste, converting solid spent fuel rods into a variety of more unstable forms — including liquid radioactive acid — that are significantly harder to manage.
The only commercial reprocessing plant in U.S. history, in West Valley, N.Y., operated for just six years before shutting down. Taxpayers may end up paying more than $5 billion for cleanup, and the site remains one of the nation’s most complex radioactive remediation challenges.
Even worse, reprocessing increases the global threat of nuclear weapons. The primary purpose of reprocessing is to extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel. Plutonium is not only extraordinarily dangerous to human health; it is a key component of atomic bombs. In fact, reprocessing technology was originally developed during World War II for the express purpose of producing plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Separating plutonium from highly radioactive spent fuel creates a stream of material that is easier to divert, steal or misuse at both state and terrorist levels. This link with increased nuclear weapon proliferation risk is well-established and is the reason for the significant long-standing concerns about reprocessing in the national security and nuclear weapons communities.
India’s 1974 development of a nuclear bomb using plutonium diverted from its own ostensibly peaceful reprocessing program generated worldwide controversy and led to Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter instituting a ban on U.S. commercial reprocessing.
The resolution from the San Diego County supervisors suggests that “emerging technologies and advanced methods” could avoid the problems with reprocessing — but these methods are not new and are not significantly better. Analysis by both the National Academies and the Department of Energy’s national labs has found that alternate reprocessing methods do not mitigate the technology’s potential to exacerbate nuclear weapons proliferation.
Finally, reprocessing just doesn’t make financial sense. This is why most countries that once pursued reprocessing have since abandoned it. France’s reprocessing program, often touted as a success, operates at a significant financial loss. Japan’s Rokkasho plant has been delayed for over a quarter-century, and project costs are expected to exceed $100 billion.
Reprocessing results in expensive, more proliferation-prone fuel with little economic demand, which is why reprocessing plants rarely operate at full capacity, do not turn a profit, and have reprocessed only a small fraction of available spent fuel.
What should be done with the San Onofre waste instead? It should be sent to a deep underground repository, as has been federal policy since 1982; San Diego County can help advocate for the restart of this siting process.
In the meantime? Work toward responsible stewardship, including relocation to a safer local site, stringent monitoring, and construction of a hot cell for repackaging. Efforts in this direction are underway in Irvine; San Diego County would be a powerful partner in this collaboration.
The Board of Supervisors has started an important conversation. Now it must steer toward solutions grounded in engineering reality, fiscal responsibility, and public safety — not toward expensive experiments that history has already judged as failures.
Bart Ziegler is the president of the Del Mar-based Samuel Lawrence Foundation. Haakon Williams is the executive director of the Committee to Bridge the Gap. Edwin Lyman is the director of nuclear power safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
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