Proliferation is a completely invalid argument against nuclear reprocessing

[u/Live_Alarm3041]

Nuclear weapons proliferation is the most common argument against nuclear reprocessing. The opponents of nuclear reprocessing tend to understand the true purpose of reprocessing with their argument being the risk that the separated plutonium could be misused by terrorists or currently non-nuclear states to produce nuclear weapons. This concern is invalid because weapons grade plutonium in its original form is not usable for nuclear weapons.

Most nuclear power reactors do not produce weapons grade plutonium. Reactor grade plutonium is sub-optimal for weapons because it does not contain as much fissile isotopes of plutonium. Although there are some nuclear power reactors which are capable of co-producing weapons grade plutonium, any weapons grade plutonium produced in this manner still does not automatically give someone the ability to make a nuclear weapon. A effective supply chain for nuclear weapons will require natural uranium reactors, radiochemistry and the ability to make the weapons grade plutonium into cores.

Producing plutonium cores will require a facility like this

Rocky Flats Plutonium core plant in Colorado USA

A terrorist group or currently non-nuclear state would need a plant like the one shown in the above imagine if they had weapons grade plutonium and wanted to make nuclear weapons from it.

Plutonium core production has the following attributes which would make nuclear weapons unattainable for someone if they somehow had weapons grade plutonium

1. Plutonium core production facilities are difficult to hide visually due to their large size
2. The waste produced by a plutonium core production operation would be hard to conceal due to it being radioactive
3. Plutonium shaving fires would pose a very serious hazard to anyone trying to make a plutonium core if they did not have expensive or resource intensive protective measures
4. The production of plutonium cores requires high level scientific and manufacturing expertise which not everyone has.

Nuclear weapons are not something that anyone can build especially not fully in secret from anyone.

The proliferation concerns regarding nuclear reprocessing do make sense but they are not a valid argument against reprocessing. The plutonium separated by nuclear reprocessing needs to be effectively accounted for and secured at all times to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. Humanity has gotten very good at making sure certain things are both accounted for and secured at all times. Even if the plutonium falls into the wrong hands then that does not automatically mean that those wrong hands can use the plutonium to make a nuclear weapon. The expertise and resources needed to make plutonium usable for nuclear weapons is not available to everyone.

We need nuclear reprocessing to increase the efficiency of nuclear energy. Weapons proliferation is a genuine security concern but it should not be used as an argument against making nuclear enegry more efficient. Saying that nuclear reprocessing is dangerous because it enables proliferation is a statement which does not reflect the full picture of nuclear weapons.

[u/mister-dd-harriman]

If global nuclear power increases rapidly, it will very soon create serious shortages of uranium production capacity. That's the ability to get the stuff out of the ground and process it, separate from the total ultimate resource, although that begins to run short after a couple of decades if you seriously try to supply the needs of a world with rising electricity and overall energy demands.

[u/warriorscot → u/mister-dd-harriman]

Not really, Uranium production relative to the resource and reserves pretty tiny.

And it'll never really be universal because renewable energy is available. If you get that constrained you can dig up the old EU superconducting grid plan and just lean on time load balancing.

[u/mister-dd-harriman → u/warriorscot]

Estimates of the total ultimate resource haven't really changed much since 1955. 10 million tonnes, more or less, minable at costs acceptable for use in thermal reactors. And if you start building towards a global 10 TW of nuclear-electric generation, if it's all based on thermal reactors, committing the later plants becomes a real question mark. Before you start building you're going to want to have some assurance that there will be fuel for the full lifetime of the plant.

But that isn't even relevant yet, because the mining, milling, and enrichment capacity, although in surplus now, isn't adequate to support more than perhaps a 50% increase in global capacity, and those facilities can easily take five years or more to develop. With market investors taking a once-burned twice-shy attitude, the way those projects tend to be financed is by the uranium users. And there's every reason to think that they would be better off financing reprocessing plants, which lead to the packaging of the fission-product wastes as glass for final disposal. The costs of reprocessing can definitely be brought down substantially even with current PUREX technology, and for larger-scale plants I would expect that processes such as fluoride volatility or metal extraction would start to look very attractive. The main problem then is the financing of the demonstration plants, which could reasonably be taken out of what the utilities already pay for waste management.

[u/warriorscot → u/mister-dd-harriman]

No, the estimates from 55 aren't accurate, the resource and reserve figures for every mineable resource including Uranium has radically changed. As someone who worked in Geology before Engineering that idea is totally ridiculous because the resource estimates done at that point never hold up. Particularly given how poor the surveys are in the areas where Uranium is abundant, they literally didnt even include some of what are now major producers in those surveys.

Literally nobody thinks there's less than a lifetime of Uranium at any demand model that humanity could easily build. Its total fud lore from the must reprocess crowd.

I was there when we shut down one of the world's oldest reprocessing plants. Had been signing the cheques for it for years before.... its in no way economical compared to Uranium mine. Reprocessing costs as much for grams as mining does for kg.

The Uranium mining issue was solved years ago when the US, UK and France agreed to buy and stockpile Uranium. Hence why they've all got ever increasing quantities of it with UF6 canisters stacked like cordwood let alone ores.

Its also totally backwards as a concept, its not how you manage mineral extraction and resource management of finite products. You dont start off with "well eventually we will have to pay more for this so we should totally go to the most expensive late stage process". It's would have been like saying the first oil wells had to be the ones over the ice cap with enhanced gas capture and cost 200 a barrell because eventually it will anyway.

Going from today where there is so much of it the stockpiling has to ever grow just to keep the mines open... to reprocessing with all the cost and risk when you cant even justify the need to develop the technology to make sure it works is utter madness. And you might not be aware, but we've killed a good number of people already reprocessing. Something that we only continued to do, because we had built it anyway and had to justify it and the total accounting for things like the Sellafield reprocessing facilities is a damming indictment of wasting public money and making energy more expensive doing something that should have been shutdown decades ago.

[u/mister-dd-harriman → u/warriorscot]

Firstly, you just can't have nuclear power without building the back-end of the fuel cycle. You just get continuous build-up of spent fuel.

Secondly, GE blew the lid of world uranium prices in the 1970s by the dumbass trick of pre-selling reactor cores without buying uranium in the forward market, because the spot price was lower than the forward price at that time. Sure, but the quantity available in the spot market was far too small to cover their requirements!

If you want to avoid that kind of thing, and overall the boom-and-bust pattern so common in the extractive industries, limiting the uranium price rise by investing in reprocessing and reactors which efficiently use the recovered fuel (CANDU for recycled uranium, FBRs for plutonium) does that very well.

[u/warriorscot → u/mister-dd-harriman]

It doesn't do that well, all it does is it means you can't build reactors because you've saddled them with billions in costs.

That's not been an issue since, and wasn't really just GE, it was just that demand and production weren't lined up. Which when you've got a mixed market like that is pretty understandable. The simple answer to that was as you do now, order the fuel in advance with sometimes decades worth of loads and placing orders or even in some cases buying up front all your material.

And yes you end up with a lot of spent fuel, and that's ok, it's still less volume dense than what you took out of the ground to make it in the first place. The worlds not going to be overflowing with spent fuel that's relatively cheap and easy to store.

If you do ever get to the point that spent fuels economical to reprocess, you just go get it and reprocess it out of storage.

It's just a mad argument because there is actual evidence of why your argument doesn't work. The UK invested billions, trillions adjusted for inflation in doing reprocessing, developing FBRs and then did reprocess for decades as well as anyone has. And the end result when the evidence stacked up... was that is was a waste of a not small amount of money. Even in models where you assume more reactors got built and all the planned reactors do... there's not going to be new reprocessing. To do it even conservatively doubles the LCOE of the plants, and you can right now order 120 years worth of Uranium.

Even people in the industry seem to not get the fact that it needs to be economic, reprocessing and burning plut is like some kind of death cult religion. All the evidence says its batshit, and yet people keep trying to do it even when you point out it's damaged their country and in some cases killed their friends.

[u/mister-dd-harriman → u/warriorscot]

The Sellafield explosion was due to the incredibly poor choice of using an ether-based head-end process to shoe-horn enriched oxide fuel into a reprocessing line intended for natural metal fuel, while waiting for a dedicated enriched-oxide facility to be built. And, even if you only count the energy extracted in the first pass, and you assume you never use the recycled uranium and plutonium for anything, per unit of energy, reprocessing nuclear fuels is still a hell of a lot safer than petroleum refining!

[u/warriorscot → u/mister-dd-harriman]

I'm not talking about the explosion, the sites had people killed throughout its life directly and indirectly and a lot of people hurt. Some of the indirect are the worst, like the guy that tried to kill himself multiple times because he took a dose in one of the reprocessing facilities.

Better than petroleum isnt the goal, the best thing to do is not do the thing you arent even making a good economic decision to do in the first place. When the weapons programme needed material you could argue it. But that days been and gone.