At the beginning of the chapter, I posed the question of whether spent nuclear fuel is really waste or a resource. In fact, it is both, but in the United States we only con­sider the waste part of it. How can it be a resource? Recall that there is still about 1% of 235U in the spent nuclear fuel that could potentially be enriched and used for new nuclear fuel. But there are also several isotopes of plutonium present in the spent nuclear fuel, including 239Pu, 240Pu, 241Pu, 242Pu, and 238Pu, in decreasing order of abundance (1). Of those, 239Pu and 241Pu are fissile,7 meaning that they can be induced to fission with slow (or fast) neutrons, the essential condition for sus­taining a chain reaction in a standard nuclear reactor. And of course there are also a lot of fission products. Suppose it were possible to extract the fissile uranium and plutonium and recycle it into new fuel to burn in a reactor. Actually, it is possible, and it is currently being done in several countries, including France, England, Russia, and Japan. The United States is the sole holdout of major countries with large nuclear power production that does not reprocess its spent nuclear fuel. The United States actually developed the technology to reprocess8 spent nuclear fuel and was building a commercial reprocessing plant in South Carolina when President Carter halted the whole program. Are we making a big mistake?

France is a special case when it comes to nuclear power. The reason is that France lacks indigenous energy resources—“no oil, no gas, no coal, no choice.” Its coal deposits are poor quality and mining ceased in 2004; France imports 98% of its natural gas and 99% of its crude oil (33). In 1973, during the OPEC oil embargo that cut oil exports to consumer countries, France realized that it was too depen­dent on foreign countries for its energy. As a result, the French government, led by Prime Minister Pierre Messmer, pushed for a rapid expansion in nuclear power capability to make France more energy secure. France now has 58 nuclear power reactors, which produce slightly over 75% of its electricity. It has nearly the cheap­est electricity in Europe and has extremely low emissions of CO2, all because of its large nuclear power portfolio (34).

AREVA is a French company, owned primarily by the French government, that is the world leader in nuclear power. It is involved in all aspects of nuclear power, from mining to building reactors to recycling spent nuclear fuel. It operates what is known as a closed fuel cycle in which uranium is enriched and made into fuel pellets that are burned in a reactor, then the spent fuel is reprocessed to extract the plutonium and uranium, which is made into new fuel that is burned in a reactor again. The result is a large reduction in the waste storage problem and the creation of new fuel. In the United States, in contrast, we use an open fuel cycle in which uranium is enriched and made into fuel pellets that are burned in a reactor; but then, instead of recycling the spent nuclear fuel, it is to be stored in some perma­nent repository such as Yucca Mountain.

I went to France to see how spent nuclear fuel is recycled and made into new fuel. The La Hague recycling plant sits on the tip of the Cotentin peninsula west of Cherbourg in the Normandy region of France. It is a beautiful drive from the coastal resort town of Barneville-Carteret, where I stayed, through the Normandy countryside to La Hague (Figure 9.4). Farmers are busy tending their dairy herds and sheep and raising crops around the recycling plant while a wide diversity of seafood is caught in the nearby ocean. You would not guess that this idyllic spot would house a facility that recycles all of France’s spent nuclear fuel and that from other countries too.

After arriving at the highly secure recycling plant, I was met by Michael McMahon, a former US Navy officer on a nuclear submarine—excellent train­ing for workers in the nuclear power industry. The deputy general manager, Jean-Christophe Varin, gave an overview of the facility and described how the uranium and plutonium are removed from the fuel rods to eventually be made into new fuel, while the fission products are separated out and made into a glass. He told me that for many years Japan has shipped their spent nuclear fuel to La Hague to be recycled and then shipped back. Japan recently built a new recycling plant at Rokkasho-Mura that began operation in 2008, so they can now do their own recycling instead of shipping spent nuclear fuel across the ocean. France also recycles fuel from several European countries, including Germany and Italy.

Michael took me on a tour of the facility after we got decked out in white jump­suits and shoes and clipped on our radiation monitors. The first place we went was the receiving area, where spent fuel is delivered from France or other countries in special casks that weigh 110 tons. They are checked for contamination, then the casks are opened under remote control and the fuel assemblies are removed and placed in cooling pools, similar to the ones at a nuclear reactor. There are four pools that can hold all of the used fuel that can be processed. The used fuel rods are held for several years to cool down, depending on where they come from. Some countries store them for years before sending them to La Hague.

When the time is right, fuel assemblies are taken from the pools and go into a shearing facility that cuts off the ends of the assemblies and shears the pellets into small pieces. They go into a nitric acid bath to dissolve the uranium, plutonium, and fission products, then the hulls are separated, washed, and crushed into casks for long-term storage. Because of the high radioactivity of the fission products, all operations are done behind thick leaded glass with remote robotic arms. The uranium, plutonium, and fission products are separated by various chemical pro­cesses and then processed in different ways. First, the uranium and plutonium are removed from the fission products in a solution. They are then further separated into different processing streams. The uranium remains in a uranyl nitrate solu­tion, which is stored until it is needed; it can then be made into uranium oxide for nuclear fuel. It is about 1% 235U and 99% 238U, so it has to be enriched in the same way that mined uranium is enriched (see Chapter 11) before being made into nuclear fuel.

The plutonium is transformed into a plutonium oxide powder and put into can­isters about a foot long and 4 inches in diameter. These are welded shut, packed into longer tubes that are screwed or bolted shut, then put into larger containers for shipping to another plant called Melox, where they will be made into new fuel pellets. Michael told me that the reason the Melox plant is not here but is near Avignon in southern France is because of a political decision years ago based on creating hundreds of jobs in Avignon. As a result, the plutonium has to be shipped across France instead of being made into fuel at the same plant. Politics intrudes into these kinds of decisions everywhere!

The fission products are fed into a calcinator, where they are heated to a high temperature and turned into a dried material called calcine. This is fed into a machine with glass frit, where the calcine is mixed and vitrified under high heat. The resulting melted glass is poured into special stainless steel casks, where it solidifies and can then be safely stored for thousands of years. According to French government rules, all of the uranium, plutonium, and fission products are returned to the nation that contracted for their recycling. France stores all of its own vitrified waste in three areas that are about the size of a basketball court, and a fourth one is being built. The casks are stacked in underground storage with air circulation to allow for cooling. It is amazing to walk around the room where the waste is stored and realize that safely stored under my feet is the total waste generated by 58 reactors, and there is capacity for storage of 50 years worth of recycled spent nuclear fuel. The waste storage problem is vastly simplified because the fission products are primarily Cs-137 and Sr-90, which will decay away, so they are less radioactive than uranium ore after about 500 years (see Figure 9.2). There are also some transuranics such as americium in the vitrified waste, which will remain radioactive for thousands of years.

The final area of the tour was the environmental monitoring area. There are some emissions that are released to the air and to the ocean. A pipe takes low level radioactive liquid effluent from the plant and releases it 5 km into the English Channel in compliance with strict regulations. Local plants, foods, fish, seawa­ter, freshwater streams, aquifers, and air are frequently sampled and analyzed for radioactivity to make sure that there are no hazards to the people or the environ­ment in the surrounding area. Twenty thousand samples are taken each year for analysis. There are two main areas that are carefully monitored—one is a fishing village where currents would likely deliver the most radiation from the effluent, and one is a farming village downwind of the plant. There have never been any problems with radioactive contamination of more than a fraction of a percent of normal background radiation. The results of the tests are summarized daily and posted on the Internet for all to see.9 Before leaving the facility, my radiation badge was checked. I had no measurable exposure to radiation during my tour.

After the tour, my hosts took me to a restaurant the facility owns that is on the coast a few km away in a stunning site. From the restaurant you can see the pipe that gently slides into the ocean to release the low level liquid waste, and if you look down the coast you can see the newest Generation III+ EPR nuclear plant that France is building at Flamanville. We had a very good lunch (it is France, after all!) and talked about nuclear issues and how recycling is a very good solution for greatly reducing the problems with spent nuclear fuel and reusing fuel.