Perhaps you can demonstrate where the IPFM supporting documentation is wrong when they say:
Waste Volumes. A major argument made for reprocessing is that it dramatically reduces the volume of radioactive waste. A number of serious biases have been found, however, in official comparisons made by EDF, AREVA and the National Agency for Radioactive Waste Management (ANDRA, the organization responsible for radioactive waste disposal in France). These include:
• Exclusion of decommissioning and clean-up wastes stemming from the post-operational period of reprocessing plants;
• Exclusion of radioactive discharges to the environment from reprocessing. Their retention and conditioning would greatly increase solid waste volumes;
• A focus on high-level waste (HL W) and long-lived intermediate-level waste (LL-IL W), leaving aside the large volumes of low-level waste (LLW) and very low-level wastes (VLLW) generated by reprocessing;
• Comparison of the volumes of spent fuel assemblies packaged for direct disposal with those of unpackaged wastes from reprocessing, which overlooks for instance the fact that packaging reprocessing waste is expected to increase its volume by a factor of 3 to 7; and
• Failure to include the significantly larger final disposal volumes required for spent MOX fuel, because of its high heat generation, unless it is stored on the surface for some 150 years instead of the 50 years for low-enriched uranium spent fuel.
We find that, with past and current operating practices, there is no clear advantage for the reprocessing option either in terms of waste volumes or repository area. Depending upon assumptions, the underground volume required for spent MOX fuel and vitrified waste can be smaller or larger than that for direct disposal of spent LWR fuel.
Full report here:
http://www.fissilematerials.org/ipfm/site_down/rr04.pdfAnd before you start in on the usual screed about breeders:
REPORT: UNSUCCESSFUL “FAST BREEDER” IS NO SOLUTION FOR LONG-TERM REACTOR WASTE DISPOSAL ISSUES]
After Over $50 Billion Spent by US, Japan, Russia, UK, India and France, No Commercial Model Found; High Cost, Unreliability, Major Safety Problems and Proliferation Risks All Seen as Major Barriers to Use.
PRINCETON, N.J. – February 17, 2010 – Hopes that the “fast breeder”– a plutonium‐fueled nuclear reactor designed to produce more fuel than it consumed -- might serve as a major part of
the long-term nuclear waste disposal solution are not merited by the dismal track record to date of such sodium-cooled reactors in France, India, Japan, the Soviet Union/Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, according to a major new study from the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM).
Titled “Fast Breeder Reactor Programs: History and Status,” the IPFM report concludes: “The problems (with fast breeder reactors) ... make it hard to dispute Admiral Hyman Rickover’s summation in 1956, based on his experience with a sodium-cooled reactor developed to power an early U.S. nuclear submarine, that such reactors are ‘expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair.’”
Plagued by high costs, often multi-year downtime for repairs (including a 15-year reactor restart delay in Japan), multiple safety problems (among them often catastrophic sodium fires triggered simply by contact with oxygen), and unresolved proliferation risks, “fast breeder” reactors already have been the focus of more than $50 billion in development spending, including more than $10 billion each by the U.S., Japan and Russia. As the IPFM report notes: “Yet none of these efforts has produced a reactor that is anywhere near economically competitive with light-water reactors ... After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries.”
The new IPFM report is a timely and important addition to the understanding about reactor...
http://www.fissilematerials.org/ipfm/site_down/ipfmnews100217.pdfAbout IPFM:
http://www.fissilematerials.org/ipfm/pages_us_en/about/about/about.php
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