Dave Lent - Should Idaho take on nuclear fuel reprocessing to turn waste into new fuel?

Idaho State Senator Dave Lent, a Republican from Idaho Falls and former nuclear facility training manager at Idaho National Laboratory, joins Lars to discuss Idaho potentially hosting a Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus, which could involve accepting and storing spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hey, welcome back to the program. It's a pleasure to be with you, and I'm really glad to be able to get Dave Lent on because Dave is not just a nuclear scientist and he spent most of his career at one of the premier nuclear facilities in the United States, the INL in Idaho, but now he's in the state legislature in the great state of Idaho. Uh Senator Lent, welcome to the program. How are you?

SPEAKER_01 0:28

Thanks, Lars. It's uh great to be here and great to have an updated talk.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

I I'm glad that because I can't tell you how many times people have said, well, we can't have nuclear. We don't know what to do with the spent fuel. And I said, yes, we do. The French know how to do it. And if if the French can do something, America can certainly do it. And you've been championing this idea for the state of Idaho. It's reprocessing the fuel. But I guess maybe what we need to explain first is, and forgive me if I make this comparison, if I put 20 gallons or 25 gallons of gas in my pickup truck, and then I run my pickup truck till the fuel is exhausted, the tank is empty. But if I had a nuclear power plant in my backyard and I said, hey, my fuel rods are exhausted, it doesn't mean that all the nuclear fuel is gone, does it?

SPEAKER_01 1:15

No, absolutely not. In fact, uh, you know, we in the United States kind of invented that process of how do you recycle or reclaim the unused uranium in spent fuel. Uh and in fact, most people don't realize that in the commercial fleet that we have, typically about 90% of that can be recycled and put back into new fuel, which reduces the volume going out to about 10% of actual waste.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

I've actually seen some people say if we actually did reprocessing, the amount of fuel or the amount of actual waste we'd have to dispose of somewhere, probably by, I don't know, encapsulating it or burying it somewhere, would be about the size of an office desk. It wouldn't amount to much, would it?

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Well, not really. I mean, typically if you take all the spent fuel currently in its current position, put it on a football field and had it about three stories tall, that would that would cover everything. But you know, if we reprocess it, it makes so much sense rather than to put all that energy in the ground and just leave it, pull it out and use it and uh and recycle it. I mean, that makes so much more sense.

SPEAKER_00 2:20

And in fact, doesn't it involve taking all the fuel rods? You know, they're titanium fuel rods, you take all these pellets out, they'll look like little juju bees, and you melt them down. I think you melt them with some kind of acid, and then you reconstitute the fuel at whatever percentage is the ideal one for nuclear power plants, and you make brand new juju bees and put them back in in the titanium in titanium rods, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:43

Yeah, that's that's exactly right. So I I've been over to France and toured their recycling facility, and we actually recycled here in the United States for several years. Uh, but the the typical process uh that they use called the aqueous method is you essentially do what you said. You they take the rods out, they melt down the fuel with acid, and then reconstitute that, pull it out. The new technology that we're working on right now is really called pyro, and it's where you use molten salts so you don't have the acids and you don't create as much waste, and you melt it down and reprocess it and separate it out that way. So it's very promising. We are actually doing that now at the Idaho National Laboratory. We're taking old fuel rods that are spent, have been in reactors. Uh, as you said, we're chopping them up into pieces, we're melting them down, pulling out the uranium, and then we're using that to create new fuel for the Oaklo reactor that's currently being built at the national lab.

SPEAKER_00 3:40

Okay, so let me ask you this, just to make this clear to people, when you put the brand new fuel in and a brand new rod in a in a in a nuclear power plant, what's the concentration of uranium? Is it five or six percent or or what is it?

SPEAKER_01 3:54

Yeah, typically, yeah, typically it runs about five to seven percent of concentration. And the process of U235, when it burns, it kind of creates it, it slows itself down. That's why you only get a certain percentage of burnup in the fuel. The new designs that we have, see a lot of the reactors right now are what they call generation two or generation three. We're now talking about generation four and four plus. And primarily the difference is they're using a little bit more enriched, up to 20% enrichment, so it'll burn longer, it's more efficient, and uh it's much it's a better process because, and this is probably I think what's most important for people to know. We're moving from active designs to passive designs, which essentially means you don't have to have an operator standing there waiting for a light to go off to push a button. They're designed that they control themselves based on the heat and temperature of the reactor.

SPEAKER_00 4:49

So you're taking advantage of convection and all that stuff. If you could get Idaho to be one of the three states that selected to have a campus for this nuclear fuel cycle, um how soon could you build this thing? How fast can it be up and operating? And what's it going to mean in the way of jobs and other economic activity to reprocess all this valuable fuel?

SPEAKER_01 5:11

Well, we're talking uh Idaho is one of the unique places in the country because we, in fact, are the place where they we invented nuclear power for electricity. Uh we have Arco, Idaho, which was the first city ever to be lit by nuclear power. Uh so we have facilities here. We've been here 70 years, we have the workforce, we have the education system, and we have the right kind of location. We're located about 50 miles outside of Idaho Falls. So all of the pieces are there. We think that the reason that really makes Idaho the select the great opportunity here for the department to work with is because we have all of those factors and primarily existing facilities on land that can be utilized very quickly. So we're talking about uh, you know, these uh uh orders that came from President Trump to really kick this into high gear came out a year ago. Uh then we went through the the request for information process, and now 28 uh applications came in from 26 states to request this. And I think that we actually can be up and running within a matter of months.

SPEAKER_00 6:13

In fact, just to give you an example, hold on. Senator, months? Wow. Yeah, and just to give you an example happens in months, especially when it involves government. Wouldn't you agree?

SPEAKER_01 6:22

Well, we we had a challenge from the president to kick this into high gear, and when I'm talking about these new generation reactors, the small modulars and the micros, we were able to bring three new reactors up online critical before the 4th of July this last year, which is unheard of. If you consider that it took us 30 years historically to put three commercial plants on, and we did three in basically a little more than a year. Granted, they're smaller, but the design and proof of process were there, so it just really kick-started. This is this thing has really gone into high gear.

SPEAKER_00 6:59

Well, you'd think the environmentalist greenies and lefties would love it. I know Monica Church, one of your colleagues in the uh legislature in Boise, doesn't like it, but the fact is, if you could reprocess and recycle all that thing, you should be singing the song of the greenies, you know, uh low carbon energy, uh abundant energy, and recycling thirty-three thousand tons of spent fuel. Senator Lent, it is a pleasure to have you on the program, and I hope you're very successful. And if you can make some government project uh come together within months, i y there ought to be a statue erected in your honor. Oh, well, you're kind, but I'm not the only one here. We've got a lot of people pulling in the same direction. Well, it sounds like a good idea. That is Senator Dave Lent. He is a Republican from Idaho Falls. He's a former nuclear facility training manager at the Idaho National Laboratory. And what they're talking about is taking thirty-three thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel, and instead of burying it in a hole in the ground somewhere like Yucca Mountain, it actually reprocess it and put it right back into the power plants and make electricity to make America great again. Back in a moment. You got the Lars Larson show and the Radio Northwest Network.