SAFEGUARDS ASSESSMENT OF SPENT FUEL DISPOSAL ALTERNATIVE?

A study has been performed for Battelle's Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation (ONWI) to compare three spent fuel disposal alternatives with the disposal of high level waste from spent fuel reprocessing. Assessments of these four cases have been made in several areas, including domestic safeguards. The study examines each case as a system, starting with spent fuel discharge from the reactor and ending with geologic disposal of wastes. The comparison of the cases is based on the comparison of similar system components. Each case encompasses all of the following (except the reference case, which has no AFRs) : transportation system elements, away-from-reactor (AFR) storage facilities, processing/encapsulation (P/E) facilities, and geologic repositories. The safeguards assessment is based on the risk to the public from sabotage and theft where sabotage is for the purpose of dispersing nuclear material and theft is for the purpose of fabricating a nuclear explosive device. The risks to the public from sabotage and theft are rated independently on a scale of 1 to 5. The value assigned for sabotage depends primarily on the potential consequences of the sabotage act while the value assigned for theft depends primarily on the attractiveness of the material stolen. The results of these comparisons show that the risk to the public from the reprocessing alternative is comparable to the risk from direct disposal of spent fuel. This study also shows that safeguards systems for any component can be designed to assure reasonable and acceptable levels of risk to the public. The cost of such a system is expected to be a small fraction of the cost of the component. Therefore, safeguards considerations should not play a major role in the selection of a disposal alternative.