Responsible Expansion of Nuclear Power Requires Global Cooperation on Spent-Fuel Management

Abstract

gating climate change will remain wishful thinking unless some crucial requirements are satisfied. In addition to cost, safety, security, and peaceful use, there will have to be a sustainable solution for managing spent fuel and nuclear wastes—the so-called back end of the nuclear fuel cycle. Highly radioactive spent fuel containing fissile plutonium should not end up in numerous locations scattered around the globe as more and more nations, both large and small, expand or introduce nuclear power. A small number of safely constructed and well-secured storage and disposal facilities must be the goal. The key challenge in this regard is the siting and construction of deep geological repositories for long-lived radioactive wastes. These repositories are expensive; even the smallest state-of-the-art deep facilities for high-level radioactive wastes (HLW) or spent fuel will cost several billion dollars. Even the much admired and most advanced small Finnish repository will cost around $4.5 billion, and cost estimates in the several tens of billions have been published for large programs such as those in the United States and the United Kingdom. Many small nuclear programs or countries starting out in nuclear energy do not have the technical or financial resources to implement a national repository in a timely fashion. They will have to keep their spent fuel in interim storage facilities; this could result in numerous sites all around the world where hazardous materials will be stored for decades to hundreds of years. There must be a better way. One safer and more secure option would be for nuclear-fuel suppliers to take back the spent fuel under a fuel “leasing” arrangement, in which they would pro-