Statement by Tom Clements, Director, Savannah River Site Watch on DOE’s DRAFT ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT FOR THE ACCEPTANCE AND DISPOSITION OF SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL CONTAINING U.S.-ORIGIN HIGHLY ENRICHED URANIUM FROM THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY, released on January 15, 2016
This woefully inadequate document on a highly speculative project that would result in German nuclear waste being dumped on South Carolina should put the scheme to bed.
It is surprising that this rather cursory document was released as it clearly confirms that no technologies or facilities exist to handle any graphite spent fuel that might be imported from Germany. My impression is that the document was released as part of a face-saving effort to close the books on the far-fetched proposal in order to somehow reduce the embarrassment that the proposal has already caused DOE.
The document affirms that the growing concern in South Carolina that SRS is becoming an international nuclear waste dump is legitimate as the document presents no pathway out of SRS for any of the German waste if brought into SRS for reprocessing.
The draft EA confirms that neither the technology nor the facilities exist to process the graphite balls at SRS and thus there is no way that the proposal could go forward. The proposed methods of processing the material at SRS are only at the research and development stage and even if that moves forward construction of unfunded pilot-scale and full-scale facilities is highly speculative at best. The draft EA does nothing to resolve the open question if the speculative processing technologies would even work or if they would generate waste forms detrimental to on-going closure of high-level waste tanks at SRS.
Timelines presented in the document reveal that proposal to process the material at SRS is totally out of sync with the timeline for decision-making in Germany, where decisions are being made right now about how the material will be managed. Germany is simply not going to base its decisions on a highly speculative research program at SRS based on technologies that don’t exist.
The draft EA makes a brief and unsubstantiated claim that the proposal is being pursued for nuclear non-proliferation reasons but DOE itself determined in 2013 that there was no proliferation risk associated with the graphite spent fuel remaining in Germany. The DOE’s determination that there is not any proliferation risk associated with this nuclear waste remaining in Germany essentially ends the discussion on this matter. (DOE document obtained via a FOIA request by SRS Watch linked here.)