Electricity bills keep climbing, with Americans paying on average 32% more than five years ago. One of the key dynamics contributing to higher prices is electricity supply is not keeping up with surging demand. Demand growth is a positive marker of American economic expansion and innovation, but consumers can’t keep footing rising costs. The U.S. needs to increase electricity supply quickly, cost effectively, and reliably.
COMMENTARY
Nuclear energy, which provides 24/7 baseload power and has one of the lowest environmental impacts of any energy source, has an important role to play in building the supply our country needs. But how we manage the waste created by scaling nuclear energy will play a significant role in determining whether the enterprise is a success. Will we use direct disposal, a process that has proven reliably efficient, or will we experiment with reprocessing, an expensive, unproven technology with significant safety and security risks?
For utilities, the question is no longer theoretical. The Trump administration appears to be considering a major spent nuclear fuel initiative that would bundle costly reprocessing with other, necessary, pieces of nuclear energy innovation. The latest sign came in January, when the Department of Energy issued a request for information to gauge state interest in hosting “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses” that cover the full fuel cycle, with a focus on reprocessing.
The allure of reprocessing is its attempt to recover plutonium, uranium, and other supposedly reusable elements from spent nuclear fuel. But reprocessing is not recycling. Real-world experience shows that almost all (99%) of the material that results from reprocessing remains unusable due to the same intractable economic and technical problems that have plagued the technology for decades. Chief among them are the multiple streams of nuclear waste reprocessing creates, which require permanent, long-term disposal and exacerbate the very challenge that the technology purports to solve. Reprocessing also poses serious proliferation risks: the plutonium it separates from spent fuel can be used to make a nuclear weapon.
If reprocessing’s technical failures are not enough to dissuade the U.S, its enormous expense should. With expected lifecycle costs for reprocessing in the hundreds of billions of dollars, the administration’s direction begs the question: who would foot the bill?
In the handful of countries that have attempted large-scale reprocessing, the government has resorted to enormous subsidies to keep the industry afloat. Wisely, Congress has not shown an appetite for this kind of massive new appropriation. The answer is also unlikely to come from the private sector—no company is raising their hand to take on the enormous, high-risk investments that reprocessing requires. Given the lack of funding avenues for a project of this scope and scale, some eyes are turning to the Nuclear Waste Fund.
The Nuclear Waste Fund, established by the government in 1982 and now valued at more than $47 billion, was built over decades with fees paid by utilities and their ratepayers for one specific purpose: financing a permanent disposal solution for spent nuclear fuel. If the fund is repurposed for reprocessing, the financial pathway to a true, long-term disposal solution would disappear.
Direct disposal—sealing spent fuel in canisters and permanently placing it in a deep underground repository—is the safest, most secure, and most economical method of waste management. It keeps spent fuel intact and leverages existing expertise and infrastructure. Most current and next-generation reactors are already optimized for direct disposal, making it the best candidate to enable rapid nuclear energy deployment. This is exactly why the Nuclear Waste Fund was established.
For utilities, the financial implications of tapping the fund to bankroll a reprocessing experiment would be a double hit: decades of payments from their customers would be consumed by unproven technology, and the permanent disposal solution that reprocessing also requires would suddenly be left unfunded. Utilities could be pressured to replenish the fund with higher electricity prices—exactly what Americans don’t need right now.
Utilities have fulfilled their end of the bargain to fund a nuclear waste solution. Every dollar diverted to reprocessing is a dollar that doesn’t go toward the permanent repository the fund was created to deliver.
A new era of clean, affordable energy is in reach. Nuclear power can help us get there, but only if we lean on the technologies that actually work and protect the funds set aside to make it happen.
—Ross Matzkin-Bridger serves as senior advisor for the Nuclear Scaling Initiative and senior director for the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s Nuclear Materials Security Program. He also served as a senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Energy.
