Statement of Sen. Ron Wyden
Before the U.S. Department of Energy Scoping Meeting
on The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP)
Hood River, Oregon    --     March 26, 2007

The Energy Department’s Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) is yet another new strategy to keep Hanford as the nuclear waste capital of the Nation.

Over some 45 years, Hanford produced some 74 tons of plutonium, first to make nuclear weapons and later as part of its continued operation of the N-Reactor despite the fact that it was no longer needed.  The results are well known to all.  Some 1,600 identified waste sites.  Some 53 million gallons of high-level waste stored in 177 underground storage tanks.  Sixty-seven of those 177 tanks are suspected to have leaked that waste into the soil.  The list goes on.

What is amazing to me is that DOE has now been trying to clean up the nuclear waste and environmental contamination for half as long as the site was actually in operation – more than 20 years – with no end in sight.  We are now coming up on the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Tri-Party Agreement between DOE, the State of Washington, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that was supposed to set specific, enforceable milestones for the clean-up.

And where are we?  The high-level waste vitrification plant was supposed to be completed and in operation by 2011 according to the Tri-Party Agreement.  It is now being delayed another eight years and construction won’t be completed until 2019 at a cost that has more than doubled – from $5.8 billion estimated in 2003 to this year’s estimate of $12.3 billion.  And the plan still leaves no solution for more than half of the so-called low-activity waste that is supposed to be removed from the tanks and which also has to be vitrified.  There’s still no plan for dealing with the waste that has leaked out of the tanks.  There’s still no plan for dealing with strontium and cesium capsules that have been retrieved from all over the country from another failed DOE program to spin gold out of nuclear waste.

My point here is a simple one.  DOE has not fulfilled its obligation to clean-up Hanford.  It’s not clear when it will.  But now, DOE is proposing to bring more waste to Hanford – this time in the form of spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants. The DOE proposal also calls for building more reprocessing facilities to separate plutonium and uranium from this fuel and generate more liquid high-level waste.  And more transuranic waste.  And more low-level waste.  And more radioactively contaminated buildings that will need to be decommissioned.

Hanford does not need more nuclear waste.  It needs less.

There are other reasons, too, why Hanford is not a suitable location for this project, starting with its location here in the Northwest.  Hanford is a long ways away, and many shipment miles, from where the bulk of the spent fuel is located at existing power plants in the Eastern U.S.  It is even farther away from the location of the mixed-oxide fuel plant DOE is trying to build in South Carolina to where the reprocessed plutonium and uranium would have to be shipped.

Trucking High-Level Nuclear Waste through Oregon for this scheme exposes Oregonians unnecessarily to serious risks, which need to be specifically disclosed to Oregonians. Those risks could include exposure along the I-5, I-205 and I-84 corridors, the fact that shipments may need to go on secondary roads through our communities, and the reasonably foreseeable impacts from accidents, fires or a terrorist targeting these highly visible U.S. Government nuclear shipments in Portland, Emigrant Pass, Troutdale, Salem or Pendleton.

I understand that DOE has a whole list of reasons why it thinks reprocessing spent fuel is a good idea – that it will reduce the amount of waste that needs to go to a permanent repository and the length of time it will need to be there, that it will remove plutonium from spent fuel and thereby reduce the threat of proliferation, and that it will create a new supply of fuel for the next generation of nuclear power plants that it hopes are built in the U.S.

The truth, as we have seen here at Hanford, is that reprocessing spent fuel is like King Midas on steroids.  When you start separating nuclear waste everything it touches becomes radioactive, including the buildings you’ve built to do the reprocessing.  It is simply not credible to argue that reprocessing reduces the amount of radioactive waste that will need to be handled.  Second, it strains all credibility to think that a massive U.S. program to separate plutonium will somehow discourage other countries around the world who seek to build their own nuclear weapons programs from doing the same.  Third, there is no evidence that there’s any shortage of uranium to power future nuclear plants.

In short, DOE should not only reject siting the GNEP fuel reprocessing facilities at Hanford, DOE should also reconsider the whole concept of GNEP.

Thank you.