Transmutation program takes step forward

The Department of Energy released a report to Congress today on a $280 billion program that could take the nation's 70,000 tons of highly radioactive commercial waste and turn it into less harmful material over 117 years.

The radioactive wastes are piling up around nuclear power plants around the nation as the DOE continues to study Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. It is the only site under scrutiny as a high-level nuclear waste repository that would have to accept everything from the red-hot core of Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to radioactive fuel pellets.

The DOE has already spent more than $6 billion on Yucca Mountain. Estimates to build and operate a repository there, if the mountain passes scientific muster, range from the DOE's $43 billion to Nevada's projection of $58 billion. The totals do not account for any accidents.

The transmutation program, if it is adopted, would cost about $2.4 billion a year over the 117 years it would take to transform the 70,000 tons of waste. A repository would still be needed, although it would be for low-level not highly radioactive waste.

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., asked for the report almost a year ago. The report recommended a five-year, $281 million research and development transmutation program after DOE's own laboratories in New Mexico helped advance the accelerators used to burn the wastes.

Domenici, chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on energy and water, has requested $9 million this year for continuing the Los Alamos, N.M., National Laboratory transmutation research. That amount is up from $4 million last year.

Sens. Richard Bryan and Harry Reid, both D-Nev., support the effort to prove the technology. If transmutation is viable, the report says, eight high-energy accelerators could eventually be built around the country to transform the deadly nuclear wastes. The report mentions the difficulties of finding sites for accelerators, even though the plants can also produce electricity for the surrounding area.

The international panel that wrote the report included scientists representing all sides of the debate over nuclear waste -- from those who support advanced transmutation technology to those who believe a repository at Yucca Mountain is the only solution.

The total amount of waste does not include the Defense Department's radioactive remains, which the report said would need to be buried in a high-level nuclear repository, such as the one under study at Yucca Mountain.

UNLV nuclear engineer Anthony Hechanova said the 7,000 tons of defense wastes could be transmuted as well. However, taxpayers -- not utility ratepayers -- would have to pay for the Defense Department's wastes. Taxpayers have already contributed more than $500 million to Yucca Mountain, which is expected to bury the defense wastes as well as the 70,000 tons of commercial wastes.

Transmutation bombards the wastes with neutral subatomic particles inside a high-energy accelerator, destroying the high levels of radiation. What is left is low-level radioactive waste, scientists say.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., said a vote triggering 30 hours of debate on African trade would come up sometime today, dimming chances that a bill bringing nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain by 2007 will be debated this year.

After African trade, the Senate still has up to four appropriations bills, legislation on reforming financial institutions such as banks and insurance companies and a bankruptcy measure to consider before it adjourns by Nov. 10, Lott said from the Senate floor.

He did not mention the bill by Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, that would allow the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, instead of the Environmental Protection Agency, to set the limits on the radiation that could escape from Yucca Mountain.

The commission would allow greater doses of radiation to escape than the EPA and would not specifically limit the amount of contamination that can occur in ground water.

Murkowski has said the EPA proposal to limit the amount of radiation in the ground water to 4 millirems, about half an X-ray's worth of radiation, would kill the Yucca Mountain repository.

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