Interim Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel - Woods Hole Research Center

1. Introduction
Interim Storage: A Crucial Issue for the
Future of Nuclear Energy
The management of spent fuel from nuclear power
plants has become a major policy issue for virtually every
nuclear power program in the world. For the nuclear industry,
finding sufficient capacity for storage and processing or
disposal of spent fuel is essential if nuclear power plants are
to be allowed to continue to operate. At the same time, the
options chosen for spent fuel management can have a substantial
impact on the political controversies, proliferation
risks, environmental hazards, and economic costs of the
nuclear fuel cycle.
Today, some countries, including Japan, see spent
nuclear fuel as a valuable energy resource, since most of its
mass is uranium and plutonium that could be recovered
and re-used for additional energy production. Other countries,
including the United States, tend to view spent fuel as
a waste, arguing that the cost of recovering its energy content
is more than that energy is worth, and that reprocessing
and recycling weapons-usable plutonium creates unnecessary
proliferation hazards. There is some merit in both of
these points of view: today, spent fuel is like oil shales, a
potential energy resource whose exploitation cannot be
economically justified at present, but may become important
at some unknown point in the future. The critical difference
between spent fuel and oil shales, of course, is that
the contents of spent fuel pose both environmental and
nonproliferation hazards, and hence generate political controversies,
that oil shales buried in the ground do not. The
countries that view spent fuel as an energy resource generally
plan on reprocessing it—either in the near term or fur-
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ther in the future—and recycling the plutonium and uranium.
The countries that see spent fuel as a waste generally
plan on disposing of it directly, without reprocessing, in
geologic repositories. These differences of perspective have
been debated for decades, and are not likely to be resolved
soon.
Interim storage of spent fuel offers a safe, secure, flexible,
and cost-effective near-term approach to spent fuel
management that may be attractive regardless of a particular
country’s perspective on these debates over whether
spent fuel is better seen as a resource or a waste. For those
countries that favor reprocessing, interim storage keeps the
fuel available for use whenever the material within it is
needed, while making it possible to avoid prematurely
building up stockpiles of separated plutonium, and offering
the flexibility needed to modify the pace and scale of reprocessing
as technical, economic, and policy factors change.
For countries that favor direct disposal of spent nuclear fuel,
interim storage allows more time to analyze and develop
appropriate geologic repositories with the care required,
and makes it possible to accommodate delays in repository
development without imperiling the operation of existing
reactors. In either case, a period of interim storage can allow
time for improved technologies and policy approaches to
nuclear fuel management to develop. Indeed, over the
decades during which spent fuel may be stored, changes
may occur in some countries’ decisions as to whether to rely
primarily on reprocessing or on direct disposal. Figure 1.1
outlines the place of interim storage in the nuclear fuel
cycle.
In short, interim storage of spent nuclear fuel is crucial
to a flexible fuel management strategy. Although inter-