Draft Global Nuclear Energy Partnership Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement

This Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) provides an analysis of the potential environmental impacts of the proposed Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) program, which is a United States (U.S.) Department of Energy (DOE) program intended to support a safe,
secure, and sustainable expansion of nuclear energy, both domestically and internationally. Domestically, the GNEP Program would promote technologies that support economic, sustained production of nuclear-generated electricity, while reducing the impacts associated with
spent nuclear fuel (SNF) disposal and reducing proliferation risks. DOE envisions changing the U.S. nuclear energy fuel cycle from an open (or oncethrough)fuel cycle—in which nuclear fuel is used in a power plant one time and the resulting SNF is stored for eventual disposal in a geologic repository—to a closed fuel cycle in which SNF would be recycled to recover energy-bearing components for use in new nuclear fuel. Recycling would be accomplished by separating SNF into usable components and waste. The usable components would be available for use as new nuclear
fuel to produce electricity and the waste components would be put into stable waste forms for storage and disposal. Internationally, the GNEP Program framework would help to ensure that nuclear power electricity generation can be expanded with reduced nuclear proliferation risk.