A Synthesis and Response of Two Articles Concerning...

Modern concerns about global warming have rekindled ideas about nuclear power in the United States but one concern still remains: what is to be done with the waste? Right now most spent nuclear fuel is stored in large casks at the plants where it was used with plans in the works for a common location to store the waste for long periods of time. Long term storage is not the only option, technology exists to take this spent nuclear fuel and remove the unused plutonium and uranium from the waste products to create more fuel. The remaining waste would be stored in a long term facility as discussed above. This process is highly controversial due to economic and safety concerns, but could increase the capacity of a long term storage facility.†¦show more content†¦Bastin also acknowledges the potential for large amounts of plutonium to fall into the wrong hands, but asserts that if a reprocessing plant is well managed, unlike plants of the past, the security of the nuclear material is not a difficult issue to control. On the subject of exposure, Bastin uses the example of the first reprocessing plant built for the United States government by DuPont. This design was built to contain all reprocessing equipment and materials in order to limit radiation exposure to employees. The main disagreement between the two authors lies in the economics of the reprocessing of spent fuel. In his article, Bastin discusses a reprocessing facility that would have been built in the early 1980s by DuPont that was based on the initial success of the pilot plant built for the U.S. Government. Using the outline of these successes, Bastin estimates that the cost of reprocessing at such a plant would cost $250 per kilogram of waste, as opposed to $1,000 per kilogram at French and British plants or even the $5,000 to $15,000 per kilogram at similar Japanese facilities. Bastin claims that the foreign reprocessing plants did not implement the ideas of DuPont’s original plant in th eir design which would have significantly lowered the cost of reprocessing. The biggest economic cost, according to Bastin, comes from not reprocessing fuel, mainly because the reprocessing of fuel allows for waste to remain radioactive for a shorter period