The report did not rule out reprocessing or a new class of reactors.
Another option is to develop a new class of reactors that would transmute nuclear waste into less troublesome materials.
In 2006, the Bush administration proposed a Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, which envisioned recycling and a new class of reactors that would run on recycled material and would break the most difficult waste products into less troublesome materials.
Some of the money went to six research projects related to the Energy Department's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, a proposal that Congress has not embraced and that would recover plutonium and other materials from spent reactor fuel, for reuse in a new class of reactors.
The Technical Review Board, which holds public meetings about three times a year, on Wednesday therefore focused on alternative strategies like building a new class of reactors that could accept the "spent" fuel from existing reactors, deriving some energy from the wastes and breaking down the most difficult, long-lived materials into elements that are easier to handle.
Another alternative for nuclear waste disposal is to build a new class of reactors powerful enough to break up the elements that are hardest to dispose of: materials that are created in reactors and remain significantly radioactive for tens of thousands of years.
For now, members of the waste commission say, the panel is unlikely to make a recommendation for starting work on two controversial disposal methods: reprocessing the spent fuel to recover plutonium for reuse, as France and Japan do, or building a new class of reactors that would break up the most troublesome wastes into materials that are easier to handle.
In this context 'evolutionary reactor' refers to the class of reactors with relatively small modifications from existing designs.
We define a class of reactors subjected to discontinuous periodic forcing, and show that all the reactors belonging to this class have spatio-temporal symmetry.
Detailed experimental evidence on the presence of limit cycles for this class of reactors will be presented in subsequent parts of this series.
