Mark Fitzpatrick, formerly at the US Department of State, and now with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, accepts that the plan may make plutonium less accessible to terrorists. But it will also make it more difficult to persuade countries like Iran to forgo enrichment and reprocessing, he argues.
EVEN as it campaigns against Iran's nuclear programme, the Bush administration seems ready to overturn a 30-year domestic ban on reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. It also wants to reprocess spent fuel from other countries, arguing that the US is a safer place to keep extracted plutonium.
Reports last week indicated that the US Department of Energy is proposing the use of a new technology known as UREX. Developed by the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, the procedure can reprocess spent fuel and produce a mix of plutonium and uranium, which can be used to fuel reactors.
Many fear that this would send the wrong message to countries like Iran and North Korea, and encourage reprocessing in Russia. "This is the worst possible thing to do," says Damon Moglen of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington DC. "It is a classic example of the US telling the world to do as we say, not as we do."
Bush officials, however, say that the risk of countries diverting plutonium into bombs would be reduced if their spent fuel was reprocessed in the US.
Mark Fitzpatrick, formerly at the US Department of State, and now with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, accepts that the plan may make plutonium less accessible to terrorists. But it will also make it more difficult to persuade countries like Iran to forgo enrichment and reprocessing, he argues.
