I want to welcome everyone to this hearing on what impact reprocessing and recycling might have on the economics of the nuclear fuel cycle should we, as a nation, choose to use these technologies to better manage our growing inventory of spent nuclear fuel.

This is the Energy Subcommittee’s second hearing on the topic of reprocessing and recycling of nuclear waste. Our first hearing, which occurred less than a month ago, focused on technology decisions and proliferation issues. At that hearing, we heard about reprocessing technologies in various stages of development, and how these advanced technologies are more proliferation-resistant than the 30-year old technologies currently used throughout the world.

Today we are going to hear from a representative of the nuclear utility industry and from a number of renowned economists and scientists on the economics of the nuclear fuel cycle. In particular, we are going to discuss what additional costs or savings might result if we switch from an open fuel cycle to an advanced fuel cycle, and how those costs and savings compare with other sources of energy, especially fossil fuels.

There are many reasons why the United States should embrace an advanced fuel cycle that uses reprocessing, recycling, and transmutation – or the burning of the most radioactive parts of spent fuel – as a way to deal with our nuclear waste problem.

First, if we were to recycle what we call nuclear “waste,” which is actually nuclear "fuel,” we could increase the amount of energy obtained from uranium resources by a factor of 10.

Second, by the time Yucca Mountain opens, it technically will be filled to capacity with all the waste generated up to 2010, requiring a second repository or an expanded Yucca Mountain for future waste.