Experts Criticize Department of Energy-hosted GNEP Ministerial
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 22, 2007
CONTACT:
Travis Sharp, Communications Director, (202) 546-0795 ext.123
tsharp AT armscontrolcenter DOT org
Washington, D.C. - Experts criticized the Department of Energy-hosted ministerial meeting of US, Chinese, French, Japanese and Russian officials to discuss the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) despite significant concerns about the nuclear proliferation implications and despite the absence of public cost and time estimates for the program. Reprocessing spent fuel pursuant to GNEP reverses a thirty-year-old practice of not reprocessing due to proliferation and cost concerns.
Dr. Frank von Hippel, Co-Chair of the International Panel on Fissile Materials and Professor of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, noted that "The GNEP proposal to limit reprocessing technology to a small number of states has already backfired in stimulating a revival of interest in France in exporting reprocessing technology and in South Korea in acquiring its own national reprocessing capabilities. In comparison, in the last thirty years of a US posture of 'we don't reprocess, you don't need to either,' no non-weapon state initiated commercial reprocessing and seven countries, including Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Germany Italy, South Korea and Taiwan, abandoned their interest in reprocessing."
According to the Department of Energy, today's ministerial serves "to bring together some of the leading nuclear fuel cycle states to discuss GNEP and its path forward toward increasing the use of safe, reliable and affordable nuclear power worldwide."
Henry Sokolski, Director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and former Deputy for Nonproliferation Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration, commented "As of yet, no private money has been invested in the effort and no government has been willing to change their own nuclear plans to alter their investments. What other governments are interested in is getting fixed fee contracts from the US to work on plutonium recycling and fast reactors such as the French and the Russians and possibly the Japanese, and in getting access to US recycling technology on the cheap."
Leonor Tomero of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation warned "Having a meeting of the 'club' of a few select countries that will have access to reprocessing technology while trying to convince the rest of the world to forego this technology is counterproductive and ill-advised. On one hand the United States is conveying the perception that this very costly and polluting technology that separates out material that can be used to make nuclear weapons is prestigious and cutting edge, and on the other hand we are attempting to convince other countries to renounce this dangerous technology. This policy will only undermine non-proliferation efforts as it legitimizes the commercial production and stockpiling of weapon-usable material, not to mention that it also creates lasting toxic waste at a huge cost taxpayers."
Tomero added "Rather than engage in this latest public relations stunt, the Department of Energy should learn from the United Kingdom's failures in this area. The United Kingdom's reprocessing plant at Sellafield is a good indication of what we can expect in thirty years if we embark on this reprocessing plan: tens of billions of dollars in clean-up, a massive accident that has shut-down the Sellafield reprocessing facility for the past two years, huge stockpiles of weapons-usable material with no disposition plan, and no solution to the nuclear waste problem."
In 1996, an in-depth National Academy of Sciences study estimated that reprocessing and transmuting the plutonium in the first 62,000 tons of US spent fuel - about half the amount that has accumulated to date - would result in an additional and unnecessary cost to taxpayers of about $100 billion.
The United States stopped reprocessing in 1976 after closing the only operating reprocessing plant at West Valley, NY where the still on-going clean-up from commercial nuclear waste reprocessing is expected to cost taxpayers $5.3 billion. The total amount of spent fuel processed in that facility was about 1% of that which is currently stored at US power plants.
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