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Russia Wants to Be an International Center for Spent Fuel
// France and the United States are against it; England undecided
The Spent Nuclear Fuel Market
An international conference on the nuclear fuel cycle concluded on Friday in Moscow. It was held under the aegis of the International Agency for Atomic Energy. Under discussion there was the turnover of spent nuclear fuel. Russia is lobbying for the establishment of an international center for the processing for storage of spent nuclear fuel outside Krasnoyarsk, but the project has limited support so far.
Alexander Rumyantsev, head of the Federal Agency for Atomic Energy (Rosatom) said that the large nuclear powers should take a common approach to the problem of nuclear waste. It was rather simple in his view. The spent fuel that has been accumulating for 50 years now “could be placed in a four-story apartment building, and the spent fuel that will accumulate in the next several hundred years, even without processing, could fit on a soccer field,” he explained. The statistics look more frightening. According to Rosatom, there are already more than 200,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel in storage, 16,000 of them in Russia. More than 90 percent of the spent fuel can be processed and reintroduced into the nuclear fuel cycle, and only about 5 percent of it is waste that should be sealed up and buried.
Now the largest nuclear countries are developing national spent fuel storage facilities, and those countries that have less developed atomic energy or that do not have all the elements of the technical cycle (no uranium fields or nuclear fuel production, for instance) can pay other countries for their technical needs and avoid many problems. The price for processing and storing ranges from $1000-2000 per kilogram of spent fuel. “Now we are talking about five to seven countries processing and utilizing the waste from atomic energy,” Rumyantsev said. One of those countries is Russia, which is lobbying for the establishment of an international center for handling spent nuclear fuel at the Chemicals and Mining Combine in Krasnoyarsk Territory.
Rumyantsev has support from deputy general director of the International Atomic Energy Agency Yury Sokolov, who stated that “it is not very effective to solve problems with spent nuclear fuel in the framework of national programs,” referring to the fact that free access to nuclear materials has the potential risk of the spread of nuclear arms and may be a temptation for terrorists. Nigeria, Morocco, Algeria, Vietnam and Turkey plan to develop atomic energy programs in the next ten years. They are expected to have generating power within the next 15-20 years.
Experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency also support the foundation of an international center, which would be under that agency's control. Russia presented several reports at the recent conference with proposals for the establishment of the center outside Krasnoyarsk. The All-Russia Scientific Research Institute for Industrial and Energy Technology (ARSRIIET) has even done preliminary calculations for the project. Igor Rybalchenko, scientific director of the ARSRIIET, stated that equipping the center at the above-mentioned combine outside Krasnoyarsk would cost between $3 billion and $4.7 billion, depending on its capacity. However, the main players on the spent nuclear fuel market oppose Russia's debut there. England and France have sufficient processing capacity of their own and the U.S. controls 80 percent of the market at present.
Discussion at the conference showed that support for the Russian proposals was limited. Neil Chapman of the Arius Association said that there are four countries in Europe –France (which is the world's leader in spent fuel processing), Germany, Sweden and Finland – that hold strictly to national principles of spent fuel processing. England and Spain have yet to define their strategies. Fourteen countries in the European Union are in favor of an international approach to the problem. Don MacKnilis of the University of South Carolina was openly skeptical of Russia's proposal. “That storage facility is now being used for internal Russian needs. To rebuild it for international use, legislative and organizational changes are needed,” he said.
Alena Kornysheva
All the Article in Russian as of July 18, 2005
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