Bush nuclear power plans may fail, experts warn

An influential panel of scientists urged US president George Bush to abandon plans for a billion-dollar push to expand nuclear power.

It said the scheme to resume nuclear waste reprocessing had not been adequately checked and depended on unproven technology which would not be ready in time.

The National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council said research into Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) was taking money and interest away from other nuclear programmes.

“All committee members agree that the GNEP programme should not go forward and that it should be replaced by a less aggressive research programme,” said the panel.

It said if the administration went ahead there would be “significant technical and financial risks”.

The US has not reprocessed nuclear waste since the 1970s. Mr Bush announced the new programme last year and has repeatedly said it is the key to US efforts to deal with growing reactor waste and still allow a large expansion of commercial nuclear power.

Internationally, the plan envisages a small number of countries including the US and Russia supplying other nations with reactor fuel and reprocessing their used fuel.

Only last week Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman underlined the importance of the programme saying it “represents the future of global nuclear power cooperation” and will “allow for a greater global reliance on civilian nuclear power to produce the electricity needed” while safeguarding against proliferation.

The GNEP plan has been criticised by activists opposing the spread of nuclear technology and Congress has refused to provide the short-term funding the Energy Department has requested.

Although nuclear fuel reprocessing continues in Europe and Japan, the US abandoned it in the 1970s because of concerns that the stream of pure plutonium that is created poses a nuclear risk.

But the GNEP programme is based on a different reprocessing method that its supporters argue would not create pure plutonium.

But the Academy panel of scientists said that “significant technical problems remain to be solved” in development of the new approach.

The programme is expected to cost billions of dollars over several decades and includes construction of reprocessing plants and next-generation “fast-burn” reactors to burn some of the processed waste.

The US Energy Department maintains that the programme in the long run will reduce the cost of commercial reactor waste disposal and remove the need for additional underground waste repositories beyond the proposed waste dump in Nevada.