Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York TimesA pool of spent nuclear fuel at the LaSalle County Generating Station in LaSalle, Ill.
When the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future was established two years ago, after the Obama administration killed a proposed repository for nuclear waste atYucca Mountain in Nevada, one of the items on its agenda was to determine whether spent nuclear fuel was in fact waste.
Among advocates of nuclear power, considerable disagreement exists about whether the spent fuel can be considered waste, given that it contains unused uranium as well as plutonium, which is created in nuclear reactors and can be used as fuel.
France and Japan have factories that chop up the fuel and chemically remove the uranium and plutonium for reuse. And on paper, there are designs for reactors that could take some of the most long-lived, troublesome materials in the spent fuel and transmute them into elements that would be easier to handle because they break down in centuries rather than millenniums.
But such reprocessing is also a path to making materials for nuclear weapons, so the United States discourages it abroad. Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter banned the technology here; President Ronald Reagan lifted the ban, but so far it has not mattered, because it is commercially unattractive to American utilities.
On Thursday, the special commission on nuclear waste released its final report. It was not encouraging to advocates of reprocessing.
The report did not rule out reprocessing or a new class of reactors. But it said that “no currently available or reasonably foreseeable reactor and fuel cycle technology developments — including advances in reprocessing and recycling technologies — have the potential to fundamentally alter the waste management challenge this nation confronts over at least the next several decades.’’
Among other problems, it said, if there were some reprocessing, the country would still need a waste repository....