My recent posts have been about breeder reactors which generate more fissile material than they consume. There is renewed global interest in breeder reactors for the production of nuclear fuel and the destruction of nuclear waste. Today's post is going to be about a recent international cooperative initiative launched by the United States.
There have been many international agreements to cooperate on the development of fast breeder technology from early European programs up to recent cooperation between Russia and China. The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) was proposed in 2006 by the U.S. Secretary of Energy for the Bush Administration.
The GNEP was intended to promote nuclear power across the world and to created what is referred to as a close fuel cycle. Twin goals were to reduce nuclear waste and also to reduce the danger of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Under the proposal, some nations that had fully developed nuclear industries would be "suppliers" who would provide nuclear fuel and take back spent nuclear fuel for reprocessing. Other countries could just have nuclear power reactors and would be referred to as "user nations."
The GNEP proposal had a lot of critics and received much less funding from the U.S. Congress that the Administration requested. Fuel reprocessing had been halted in the U.S. because it was expensive. There were also concerns about nuclear proliferation even though one of the expressed goals of the proposal was to prevent proliferation. Critics claimed that GNEP would be very costly and would not really solve the non-proliferation problem.
Sixteen countries signed the GNEP statement of Principles and became official GNEP Partners by fall of 2007. Nine other countries have signed on since the original group. Seventeen countries have offered membership in GNEP but refused to sign the Statement of Principles. They are officially listed as observers. Some of the countries refused to become full partners because they would have promised not to develop enrichment or reprocessing technology and that would have locked them into the "user nation" classification. There was some concern that under the GNEP, the supplier nations would have a monopoly on nuclear fuel production and would be able to raise prices as much as they wanted.
The U.S. Department of Energy cancelled the portion of the proposal that dealt with nuclear operations inside the U.S. in 2009. DOE said that work on reprocessing spent nuclear fuel would stop but that there would continue to be research into fuel reprocessing that would reduce the danger of proliferation and explore the disposal of nuclear waste. Eventually new reprocessing technology that separates all the transuranics from spent nuclear fuel instead of just the plutonium was developed. The resultant mix of transuranics can be used as fuel. This reinvigorated the U.S. involvement in the GNEP. Tomorrow, I will discuss the current incarnation of the GNEP which has been renamed the International Framework for Nuclear Energy Cooperation.
