Letter to Energy Secretary Chris Wright about President Trump's Big Beautiful Bill

The Honorable Secretary Wright:

President Trump's Big Beautiful Bill does much to undo the Greta Green Energy Transition nonsense in the Inflation Production Act. President Trump's executive orders will almost surely stimulate a new era of reliable, safe, clean, and economic nuclear power.

One significant problem still remains.

The United States has about 90,000 metric tonnes of spent nuclear fuel, pejoratively called nuclear waste. It's actually 5%-used fuel. The only way to use the 95% of it that is valuable fuel is to process it to separate fission products, which poison the nuclear reaction.

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 imposed a tax of 0.1¢ per kilowatt hour on electricity generated by nuclear reactors, ostensibly to manage spent fuel. Courts rescinded the tax because the Department of Energy refused to accept custody of spent fuel, as required by the Act. Notwithstanding, the Nuclear Waste Fund now contains $43 billion.

Unfortunately, the Act explicitly prohibits any of the Fund to be used to process spent fuel. The rationale for that prohibition was apparently that if the United States did not process spent fuel, other nations would not develop nuclear weapons. That conjecture appears not to have been correct.

The best way presently known to process spent nuclear fuel is the pyroelectric method developed by Argonne National Laboratory, and deployed at very small scale in conjunction with Experimental Breeder Reactor II at Idaho National Laboratory. Other nations that process spent fuel use the PUREX process, which separates only uranium and plutonium, leaving other transuranic actinides with the fission product stream. Although much reduced compared to unprocessed fuel, that fission product stream therefore still needs effectively eternal custody. If those actinides — which are also future fuel — were not present, custody would be reduced to 300 years; the pyroelectric method removes them. If in addition caesium and strontium, the only elements needing 300-year custody, were separately stored, half of the rest would be innocuous before thirty years, and the remainder aren't even radioactive. Caesium and strontium constitute only 9.26% of all fission products. It is not yet known, however, whether the additional cost to separate them would sufficiently reduce the cost to store the remaining material to justify the separation.

In addition to 90,000 tonnes of spent fuel, the United States has about 900,000 tonnes of depleted uranium. All of that is future fuel, but only in fast-neutron breeder reactors integrated with spent fuel processing, a principle called the Integral Fast Reactor or IFR, as described eloquently by Charles E. Till and Yoon Il Chang in Plentiful Energy: The IFR Story.

Heavy metal is consumed at the rate of about one tonne per gigawatt-electic (GWe) year. Activists insist an all-electric American energy economy would have appetite for about 1,700 GWe. At that rate, the nearly-million tonnes of heavy metal the United States has above ground could power an all-electric all-nuclear American energy economy for more than 500 years without mining, milling, refining, enriching, or importing one new gram of uranium. A 1,700 GWe fleet of fast-neutron reactors coupled to spent fuel processing would produce about 157 tonnes of caesium and strontium per year — about 76 cubic meters, or nine cement-mixer truck loads. We can easily handle that.

Two actions are necessary to eliminate the “nuclear waste” problem and access the resource of future fuel:

• Renew research and development of fast-neutron breeder reactors, especially designs based upon Experimental Breeder Reactor II, which was proven in 1986 to an invited international audience to be “walk-away safe.” One step in that direction would be to revive the Versatile Test Reactor.

• Allow the Nuclear Waste Fund to be used for spent fuel processing and build a pilot-scale pyroelectric processing facility. Dr. Chang and his colleagues at Argonne National Laboratory developed a detailed plan for a 100 tonne per year facility, and estimated the capital cost would be about $400 million.¹ Applications of lessons learned, and economies of scale, would later reduce the price. The estimated cost to process spent fuel — including operations and capital amortization — would be 0.085¢ per kilowatt hour. At that price, the cost for spent fuel processing for a 1,700 GWe all-electric all-nuclear American energy economy powered by fast neutron reactors would be about $1.445 million per year. That could be financed for almost 30,000 years by the $43 billion Nuclear Waste Fund. This is incorrect by a factor of 8766. I mistakenly calculated using the cost of 0.085¢ per kWe-year, not 0.085¢ per kWh. I had not yet sent letters to Secretary Wright, President Trump, or Senate Majority Leader Thune by post. The correct version is now in the post.

Please urge Congress to make these changes, ideally by Senate amendments to President Trump's Big Beautiful Bill.

There are more details in my book Where Will We Get Our Energy? Everything is quantified. There is no vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations allow readers to verify I didn't simply make up stuff.

• Y. Chang et al, Conceptual Design of a Pilot-Scale Pyroprocessing Facility, Nuclear Technology 205, pp 708—726 (May 2019), https://doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1513243.

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