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Los Alamos Monitor Article on GNEP Hearings
published Friday, November 21, 2008  6953 Views :: 12 Comments
Nuclear partnership debated
By ROGER SNODGRASS

The Department of Energy’s project to support domestic and international
nuclear energy development drew a relatively light response at a public
hearing Thursday.

Five people spoke against and one urged full speed ahead.

Sol Golub of the department’s Office of Nuclear Energy gave an overview of
the history and issues involved in the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership
(GNEP) and the matter at hand, a Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact
Statement

There was no participation by Los Alamos National Laboratory or Los Alamos
county officials or local business leaders, as has been the case in recent
nuclear-related hearings. The session was the only GNEP hearing in northern
New Mexico in this phase.

Bill Stratton, a member of the Los Alamos Education Group, urged the
department to get going before the country is so far behind that it runs out
of electricity.

“Stop using the PEIS as a stalking device,” he said “Find a contractor to
design the plant and start doing it on a modest scale. One learns by trying.
I urge DOE to commence these activities,” he said.

Opponents agreed that the project was too expensive — with no estimate of
lifetime costs — and too dangerous in terms of enlarging the sphere of
radioactivity and by potentially proliferating weapons-grade nuclear
materials.

“Reprocessing is the fundamental link between a nuclear reactor and a
plutonium bomb,” said Susan Gordon of the Alliance for Nuclear
Accountability, representing a national network of organizations.

“Irradiated or ‘spent’ fuel is separated into its constituent ingredients
usually using acid. One of the ingredients, plutonium can be used to make
new reactor fuel – or nuclear bombs.”

The summary document for the proposal anticipated certain “areas of
controversy.”

“During the scoping process, concerns were raised relative to nuclear power
in general and the alternatives specifically,” the authors wrote. “DOE
believes that several of these areas remain of concern and reflect differing
points of view or irreducible uncertainties.”

Although the deadline for comments is now set as Dec. 16, Golub said that
date was likely to be extended another 60 days.

This PEIS entered the public arena with a preliminary notice in March 2006
and drew some 14,000 comments during a series of scooping meetings a year
later.

Since then the scope of the document has changed from one that laid out a
vast international program for nuclear services and picked locations for
several large facilities.

The new draft no longer evaluates impacts from the international partnership
component, and looks at “generic” sites rather than specific locations.

Los Alamos National Laboratory, for example, was one place under
consideration the Advanced Fuel Cycle Facility, the proposed central
government research center for reprocessing, waste management, safeguards
and separation of the radioactive wastes.

Should the proposal advance, site-specific impact statements would be
required that take into account the selected location and its activities.

That leaves formidable technical questions at the heart of the current
proposal – whether to choose one of the alternative “open fuel cycles” or
one of several “closed fuel cycles.”

The difference between open and closed is that in an open fuel cycle, the
fuel goes “once through” the reactor and what is left goes to a repository.
In the closed cycle, spent fuel from the nuclear reactors is reprocessed for
additional use.

“We recognized in 20-20 hindsight that one proposal to close the fuel cycle
wasn’t sufficient,” Golub said, in discussing the restructured proposal.

There was also additional feedback from the nuclear industry. Four
industrial teams were awarded $34.3 million since September 2007, to provide
design studies and technology roadmaps from the business perspective.

Their consolidated report, Golub said, was about “how to make it
economical.”

Comments should be sent to:

Mr. Frank Schwartz

U.S. Department of Energy

Office of Nuclear Energy – NE-5

1000 Independence Ave.

Washington, D.C. 20585

Fax: 866-645-7807

More information including the entire study, reports and documentation is on
the Web: www.gnep.energy.gov
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