Nuclear power and the fuel cycle

The high level waste from reprocessing is immobilised in a vitrified form. It is shipped back to the country that generated the waste along with the stripped fuel that can be recycled as MOX.

Synroc, invented in Australia, is a ceramic capable of very high loading with radioactive waste. This is important as it reduces the volume of the material needed to immobilise the waste and hence the cost of disposal. It has been used for treating high level wastes generated by military programs in the United States.

The establishment of an integrated spent fuel management industry with both Australian and international participation has been attempted but encountered substantial political obstacles.

The concept was for the long-term storage and possibly final disposal of waste. The potential economic benefits to Australia were very large. Even restricting the waste to Australian-sourced uranium would be a substantial annual market of 1,000 to 2,000 tonnes of spent fuel with $1 to $2 billion annual revenues.

The preferred solution is deep geologic burial. This is under development in Europe (Finland, Sweden) and in the USA possibly at Yucca Mountain although regulatory approval is stalled. In Australia the optimum geology occurs in remote regions of South and Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Such a mine is essentially an underground driveway with access to a number of chambers for the disposal of thousands of tonnes of material. This is not major bulk material disposal but rather a high-quality material handling operation.

This repository project would provide the solution to the greatest unmet need of the nuclear fuel cycle, the long term or final disposal of nuclear waste.

6. National and International Issues

Any further involvement of Australian companies in the nuclear fuel cycle beyond mining uranium will depend on changing the public perception of nuclear energy. The problems in the nuclear power plants at Fukushima, coupled with the perception of disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl have once again caused politicians and governments to overreact to perceived dangers of nuclear power.

However, if climate change policies force the closing of coal fired base load power stations then nuclear power generation has the viable low CO2 emission replacement technology. Although it may take the experience of brownouts and blackouts before this is seen as a universal truth.

Internationally Australia has been very thorough in establishing safeguards against the misuse of uranium. Australia is a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as a non-nuclear weapons state. The safeguards agreement under the NPT came into force in 1974 and Australia was the first country in the world to bring into force the Additional Protocol in relation to this, in 1997. In addition to these international arrangements Australia requires customer countries to have entered a bilateral safeguards treaty which is more rigorous than NPT arrangements. These treaties have been an obstacle to selling uranium to India. While the United States has managed to reach a safeguards agreement we have not but it may be imminent.

Perhaps the greatest contribution that Australia can make to non-proliferation and more generally enhancing the security of nuclear power users around the Pacific and Indian Oceans is the development of a repository for spent nuclear fuel. There are very good reasons to host spent fuel and waste from any source. Australia's twin stabilities, geological and political, offer important advantages as a destination country.

Conclusions

Australia plays no part in the enrichment or disposal of uranium fuel. Despite the creation of a new enrichment technology, there does not at this time appear to be an opportunity for participation in plant development.

There is a very substantial potential role for Australia to play in the safe disposal of used uranium fuel. The time scale for general agreement, site selection, planning, negotiation and construction is likely to be 10 to 20 years. If started now, it could be the beginning of a major contribution to the Australian economy with $2 billion revenues annually by simply taking 2,000 tonnes of spent fuel rods generated from our exports of uranium ore. This could rise substantially if the facility gained international acceptance. Australia would also be positively contributing to regional and global concerns about the use of nuclear power.

The limitation to any development remains political opposition to the further development of nuclear power.