Saturday, 3 November, 2007

New Scientist

You probably wouldn't offer to take your neighbour's trash unless you had a pretty clever way of getting rid of it. But that's what the Bush administration was accused of this week over its plan to reprocess other nations' nuclear fuel.

A report by 17 experts at the US National Academy of Sciences recommended scaling back the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), which aims to encourage worldwide adoption of nuclear power by sharing reactor know-how - but not reprocessing technologies that could be used to divert material for nuclear weapons. It would mean a handful of member countries including China, Russia, France, Japan and Australia would recycle spent fuel from nuclear power stations in other countries.

These reprocessing nations are relying on fledgling technologies that minimise by-products such as plutonium, but the report claims these are unproven.

The findings have been welcomed by the Federation of American Scientists. "GNEP has the potential to become the greatest technological debacle in US history," says Ivan Oelrich of the FAS.