Publication Laka-library:
Risky relapse into Reprocessing. Environmental and Non-Proliferation Consequences of DOE's Spent Fuel Management Program
| Author | Noah Sachs, IEER |
| Date | 1996 |
| Classification | 3.01.5.23/05 (UNITED STATES - REPROCESSING) |
| Front | 
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From the publication:
Foreword For almost two decades, beginning with a far-sighted Ford administration decision, the United States has been alone among the major nuclear powers in recognizing that recovering plutonium from civilian power plant spent fuel does not make economic sense and, moreover, that it presents grave proliferation dangers (plutonium from civilian reactors can be used to make nuclear weapons). In 1982, the United States codified into law a prohibition against the use of plutonium of civilian reactor origin for military purposes. In 1988, the United States stopped producing plutonium in military nuclear reactors, and all plans for plutonium separation for military purposes were formally stopped in 1992. The military aspect of U.S. policy was driven by the official recognition that the United States was "awash in plutonium" (m the words of then Energy Secretary John S. Herrington) and by concerns about the safety of deteriorating production facilities. These plutonium policies make the United States the only leading nuclear power that has actually renounced plutonium separation for either civilian or military purposes. As a result, the United States is in a unique position of leadership to address the dangers arising from continued reprocessing and accumulation of weapons-usable fissile material, whether they are of civilian or military provenance. Other declared nuclear weapons powers continue to separate plutonium for civilian or military purposes or both. Moreover, a number of countries that are not declared nuclear weapons states are accumulating separated civilian plutonium: Japan, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, and India are among them. Israel presumably continues to accumulate military plutonium. Several other countries are expressing interest in either acquiring civilian plutonium stocks by purchasing reprocessing services or in building reprocessing plants themselves. A policy on such a crucial issue should not be put at risk without careful consideration for all the non-proliferation and other issues involved. Moreover, as many studies, including those done by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research have stressed, most reprocessing technologies, including all operating plants, pose special environmental dangers arising from the production of low-level, transuranic, and especially liquid high-level radioactive wastes. Every increase in the already large and problematic inventory of high-level wastes, which is stored in tanks at DOE facilities, results in some increase in the risk of fires and explosions. This is, in many ways, already the most serious safety problem in the nuclear weapons complex.
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