Part 1 of 2 Parts
     RePlanet is an environmental group that advocates recycling spent nuclear fuel as a fuel for advanced fast reactors. They have just published a report titled “What a waste: How fast-fission power can provide clean energy from nuclear waste”. The report mentions that European nuclear power reactors “have a long history of safe use, and have provided prodigious quantities of clean electricity for decades”. However, they actually burn up less than one percent of the energy potential in the natural uranium used to make their fuel. In addition, irradiated fuel assemblies are classified as “nuclear waste”.
     RePlanet states that it “is a network of grassroots charitable organizations driven by science-based solutions to climate change, biodiversity collapse and the need to eliminate poverty” which is funded exclusively from charitable sources. It adds that “We have not received any funding from industry or party-political sources.”
     RePlanet goes on to says, “While this nuclear ‘waste’ is not a serious environmental or health threat – it occupies trivial volumes compared to waste produced by other industries, and does not harm anyone if properly shielded and safeguarded – it does provide a political challenge, and is among the most oft-cited reasons for continued opposition to carbon-free nuclear power.”
     RePlanet says that utilizing this spent nuclear fuel in a new generation of fast-neutron reactors would “eliminate it as a ‘waste’ concern via a carbon-free waste-to-energy process”. It notes that most of the remaining fissions products in spent nuclear fuel would return to a level of radioactivity comparable to the original uranium ore in just two hundred to three hundred years. “This means that current deep geological disposal strategies can be simplified and scaled back.”
     RePlanet issued a call to European green parties to end their “dangerous and unscientific” opposition to nuclear power because of the dangers of climate change. Mark Lynas is the RePlanet co-founder. He rejects the view that spent nuclear fuel is a waste product that needs to be buried in deep geological repositories. This just leaves a toxic legacy for future generations. He noted that “Anti-nuclear campaigners never tire of repeating this mantra in their campaign to shut down nuclear plants irrespective of our climate emergency. However, we show in this RePlanet report that nuclear waste simply needs to be recycled efficiently in order to generate centuries of clean power for Europe and the UK. This material is not waste, it is fuel for the future.”
     The new RePlanet report proposes “a repurposing of nuclear materials with a view to fast-tracking an urgent program of fast reactor build-outs. These must be deployed in such a way as to reduce grid congestion and increase security of supply to enable the deployment of wind, solar and nuclear for the majority of electrical power generation and heat supply in a net zero Europe.”
     It notes, “We find, using a calculation based mainly on current inventories of uranium, that there is sufficient energy in nuclear ‘waste’ to run Europe at current electrical power consumption for up to a thousand years. If unconventional uranium and thorium resources are considered in the global picture, nuclear fuel is essentially limitless.”
Please read Part 2 next.