French Report Doubts Merits of Reprocessing and MOX by Annie Makhijani Nuclear proponents like to point to France as the success story of nuclear energy. Nuclear power plants generate 75 to 80 percent of France's electricity and this is often held up as a symbol of the presumed wide acceptance of nuclear energy among the French public.1 However, since the late 1980s, when the French government first tried to start local investigations for possible repository sites, one of the public's top concerns has been the management of nuclear waste. This concern has, in turn, fueled a debate regarding the phase-out of nuclear power. Within this context the more narrow, but crucial, debate of putting and end to reprocessing has for the first time received official consideration. A July 2000 report, entitled Etude économique prospective de la filière électrique nucléaire ("The Economic Prospects of the Nuclear Electricity Sector"), was commissioned by the French Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, to provide the government2 with an economic analysis of nuclear power, including reprocessing and the use of MOX (mixed [plutonium and uranium] oxide) fuel.3 The report is known as the Charpin report, after its primary author, Jean-Michel Charpin, who is the head of the Commissariat du Plan.4 The other two co-authors are Benjamin Dessus, Director of the ECODEV (Ecodéveloppement) program at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique,5 and René Pellat, Haut Commissaire à l'énergie atomique (Commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission). Given the diverse constituencies represented by the authors, including the French nuclear establishment, the report must be viewed as something of an official technical consensus document. In the introduction of the report, the authors state that: "We did not try to define the most desirable outcomes, even less how to get there. Therefore, this study does not make any recommendation. [...] Our ambition was not to guide the choices of the authorities, or even to influence public opinion. It was to allow the necessary democratic debate to take place on the basis of verified information and explicit technical, economic and environmental reasoning." Although the report did not make any recommendations, its two main conclusions regarding reprocessing are clear. They are, moreover, based on data furnished by the nuclear industry itself. First, reprocessing and MOX fuel use are uneconomical and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Second, reprocessing and MOX fuel use will contribute little to the reduction of the inventory of the transuranic radionuclides in waste, including plutonium. The report is structured to show a comparative economic analysis of possible various modes of electricity generation. It also evaluates the long-term impact of those options on the environment, notably carbon dioxide emissions. What follows is a summary of Chapter I of the report, "Pour la France: l'héritage du passé" ("Regarding France: the legacy of the past"), in which the two conclusions regarding reprocessing are reached. In order to put the report in context, we first provide a quick overview of the electricity sector and MOX fuel use in France. Electricity production in France The overall electricity production in France in 1997 was 481 TWh (terawatt-hours)6, with 376 TWh (78 percent) coming from the nuclear sector. The civilian nuclear sector is comprised of 58 pressurized water reactors. Of these, 20 are currently using MOX, 8 can be modified to use MOX but are not presently using it, and the remaining 30 reactors use UO2 (uranium dioxide) fuel and cannot be modified to use MOX. The reactors that are loaded with MOX use a 30 percent MOX core. The rest of the fuel is low enriched uranium. The MOX load of these 20 reactors is comprised of almost all the plutonium that is separated from French spent fuel. Table 1 shows the total amount of spent fuel unloaded from French reactors and the amount of that which is reprocessed. Were MOX to be loaded into all twenty-eight reactors that can use it, all of the approximately 1,100 metric tons of UO2 spent fuel generated annually in France could be reprocessed. There is, however, a considerable backlog of unused separated plutonium that is stored in France, since the extensive use of MOX is far more recent than commercial reprocessing. Table 1: Types and Amount of Fuel Reprocessed in France Type of spent fuel Annual unloading, in metric tons Amount reprocessed, in metric tons UO2 ~ 1100 850 MOX ~ 100 0 Total 1200 850 Source: Commission Nationale d'Evaluation Relative aux recherches sur la gestion des déchets radioactifs, Instituée par la loi 91-1381 du 30 décembre 1991, Rapport d'Evaluation No4, October 1998. The scenarios The report did its analysis by constructing seven scenarios. Six of these postulate various future levels of reprocessing and MOX fuel use. These are basically divided into two sets of three scenarios each, which differ only in the assumed life for the reactors (41 versus 45 years). The seventh, called S7, is a fictitious scenario that estimates the price of electricity in France assuming that reprocessing had never been initiated. The difference in the assumed average lifetime is so small that we focus discussion here only on the second set, S4 through S6, which assume a reactor lifetime of 45 years. This is the assumption also made in the no-reprocessing scenario and therefore allows a comparison of the costs of various levels of reprocessing with no reprocessing. Scenarios S4 through S6 involve the following assumptions: Scenario S4 assumes that reprocessing would stop in 2010. S5 corresponds to the current situation in France, in which 70% of the spent fuel is reprocessed and the extracted plutonium is fabricated into MOX and irradiated in 20 reactors. S6 corresponds to the situation where all newly generated spent fuel (but not the past stocks of the unreprocessed spent fuel) is reprocessed and the extracted plutonium is fabricated into MOX and irradiated in 28 reactors. Note that no scenario assumes an early halt to reprocessing. The report notes that before rejecting it, the authors had contemplated a scenario involving the termination of reprocessing in 2001, date for the renewing of Electricité de France's reprocessing contracts. The rational given for not considering an early halt to reprocessing is that a sudden stop would entail numerous technical (storage of irradiated fuel), social, and legal problems. Roland Lagarde, who is Environment Minister Dominique Voynet's point person on this, has recently broached the possibility of ending reprocessing in 2002. Economic analysis Table 2 summarizes the costs of scenarios S4 to S7, where the same 45-year lifetime per reactor is assumed. The costs shown include deferred decommissioning costs. (Immediate decommissioning is more expensive.) All cost figures are in constant 1999 French francs. Table 2: Electricity Cost and Generation Under Different Reprocessing Schemes in France Scenario S4 (end reprocessing in 2010) S5 (70 % reprocessing) S6 (full reprocessing) S7 (no reprocessing) Cumulative cost, billions of francs 2,888 2,910 2,927 2,762 Total cumulative electricity generation, billion kilowatt-hour (billion kWh) 20,238 20,238 20,238 20,238 Average cost of electricity, in centimes/kWh 14.27 14.38 14.46 13.65 Notes: The dollar-franc exchange rates fluctuate. An approximate conversion may be made by assuming one US dollar is approximately equal to one euro. The euro and franc have a fixed relationship at 1 euro = 6.55 francs. One centime = 0.15 cents. Several conclusions can be drawn from these results. It is clear that France would have been far better off economically without reprocessing. The cumulative cost difference between the nuclear establishment's desire for full reprocessing and no reprocessing amounts to 165 billion francs (about $25 billion, assuming 6.55 francs = one US dollar). This amounts to a difference of about 3.7 billion francs per year (about $560 million), averaged out over the entire assumed life (45 years) of all the reactors. However, MOX is used in only some reactors and for only a portion of the life of these reactors. Hence, the cost difference between the full reprocessing and no reprocessing scenarios per reactor using MOX per year of MOX use is roughly $50 million (including the related reprocessing costs). Stopping reprocessing in 2010 would save almost 40 billion francs cumulatively ($6 billion) whereas increasing the plutonium reuse from 70 to 100% of the UO2 spent fuel generated annually would cost an extra 17 billion francs ($2.6 billion). Unfortunately, the figures for stopping reprocessing in 2001 or 2002 are not given. But an extrapolation from the figures given indicates that the savings would be considerably higher. Material balance analysis Table 3 shows the projected stocks of plutonium and americium at the end of reactor operating lifetimes, assumed to be 45 years, in metric tons. Table 3: Quantities of Plutonium and Americium Contained in Unreprocessed Spent Fuel (UO2 and MOX) Generated Under Various Reprocessing Schemes in France Scenario S4 (End reprocessing in 2010) S5 (70% reprocessing) S6 (full reprocessing) S7 (no reprocessing) Final stock of plutonium and americium, in metric tons 602 555 514 667 Note: Americium contributes only a few percent to the quantities listed. Hence maximum reprocessing compared to no reprocessing reduces the plutonium stock by only 153 metric tons (S6 versus S7), or only about 23%. The difference in plutonium stock between phasing out reprocessing by 2010 and full reprocessing is even smaller (15%). The reasons that reprocessing has only small impacts on plutonium stocks are: Spent MOX fuel still contains a large amount of residual plutonium. France has a backlog of separated plutonium from the long period when it had no reactors or few reactors using MOX. 7 France does not have the reactor capacity to use this backlog. Moreover, aged plutonium contains americium-241, a strong gamma emitter resulting from the decay of plutonium-241. Its presence is a hazard to workers and would necessitate its removal from the plutonium prior to MOX fabrication. France's plan to use large amounts of plutonium in breeder reactors has fallen apart because of the severe technical problems and the very high costs of the breeder reactor program. France has permanently shut down its star of this program, the Superphénix, by far the largest breeder reactor in the world, well ahead of the original schedule. There is plutonium in the spent fuel that France does not plan to reprocess, because it could not use the plutonium without engaging in a transmutation program.8 IEER conclusions The Charpin report provides the public with first detailed look at the official data on reprocessing and MOX fuel use in France. Its conclusions clearly point the way towards an early end to reprocessing since no significant problem in the energy or waste management sectors can be addressed by it. A rapid phase-out of reprocessing and therefore MOX fuel use would appear to be in the economic interest of Electricité de France, which, like utilities elsewhere, is facing an era of deregulation and competition. The company that would be opposed to such a policy would be Cogéma, the primarily government owned company which operates all of France's reprocessing and MOX fuel fabrication plants.