Mythology of the Back End of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle
Citation: Presented at Science and Security Seminar on April 24, 2006 on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC Document: Click to download
One of the main justifications for the President's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership program is to offset the problems associated with high-level nuclear waste management by eliminating the waste and therefore the need for more geologic repositories while expanding the use of nuclear energy at the same time. The question is whether this is a cost effective and technically reasonable proposal. At the moment, there are a number of unexamined issues associated with the GNEP program and nuclear waste disposal, which could eliminate any advantages provided by the GNEP the program:
- Calculations of the size of a repository at Yucca Mountain in GNEP program documents are oversimplified: there are geologic limits on the size of a repository at Yucca Mountain.
- The effects on the repository if the GNEP program does not realize all of its goals are not discussed, including waste storage plans for various significant waste streams.
- The generation of large amounts of low- and intermediate-level nuclear waste is never examined.
- The costs of the different options are not compared and evaluated.
If GNEP does not provide the answers to the problem of high-level nuclear waste disposal, are there other solutions |
This document is classified within these themes:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Waste Management
| This document is directly associated with the following: |
|
